


The Lightbearers

by qqueenofhades



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Alternate Universe - Victorian, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 18:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 35
Words: 233,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1868697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steampunk AU. When bounty hunter Emma Swan is commissioned by Robert Gold, powerful and mysterious president of the Royal Society of English Magicians, to take down notorious airship pirate Captain Killian Jones, it lands them in a web of political and magical intrigue, dark secrets, and the dangerous London underworld - as well as their unwanted attraction to each other. COMPLETE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

The closer he got, the more it glittered, a great monolith of glass in the westering autumn sun. Swept up in the human tide, he elbowed from side to side so nobody'd knock him over, for in this crowd he wouldn't be bloody getting up again. All of them were drawn toward the Crystal Palace reclining magnificently among the lawns of Hyde Park, gulping in the curiosity-seeking masses. Admission to the Great Exhibition at first had cost the ungodly sum of three guineas the day, its marvels only visible to the rich and idle, but as Parliamentary season ended and the wealthy were fleeing London for their country houses, the price had come down. It'd be closing soon, the first fortnight of October, and then what they were after would never be in reach again. So the Captain said, at least, and the Captain was usually right.

As he casually cut the queue, Will Scarlet palmed a shilling from the unguarded purse in front of him, stepped up, and punched it into the box. He took the chit torn off the bronze machine and strolled in through the turnstiles, while the other bloke was still protesting he'd had his fee right here, just then, he swore he'd had it, he hadn't a clue where it could have gone. Will tipped him a regretful salute, then started to trot.

It was all he could do to keep his attention on the business at hand, when his head wanted to spin in every direction at once. Full-grown trees stood inside the Palace's soaring vaults of glass and iron, mysteries and wonders from every corner of the world beckoned alluringly, fountains splashed and sparkled, Turkey carpets the size of houses hung like banners, clockwork automata of every size and shape whirred and ticked and marched, and conjurers were everywhere, doing tricks. Cascades of colored sparks, pulling coins from improbable bodily orifices, some of the better ones even levitating themselves, the sharp ozone scent of aether heavy and golden in the air. Bunch of cut-purse charlatans, Will thought disdainfully. They wouldn't know where to find what he was after – or what it was – if it fell damn on their bloody noggins.

He kept on going, manfully resisting the urge to pinch something off the food-sellers that he passed, even though he was starving. No time for delay. His sole purpose was to get it, and get out. And though every bloody magician in the City of London was likely to be on his tail by that point, none of them knew the streets, and the underworld, like Will did. The rendezvous was three days from now, by which point the Captain would have secured the details and the buyer for the item Will was presently liberating. Three days was nuffing.

Will passed the impatient crowds trying to see the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the one they said was the biggest in the world. For a moment his fingers twitched, absurdly tempted, but they had peelers out the arsehole surrounding the booth, all impeccably uniformed with shining brass buttons, all armed with truncheons and nightsticks and pistols, and all with their heads rotating tirelessly in every direction, piggy little eyes scanning for honest thieves such as himself, all of whom they would be delighted to beat the living tar out of. And the Captain had said what they (rather, he) was stealing here was worth ten times that. They'd all be rich men.

 _Rich men._ Will played the words around in his head, as he had countless times before. That was what he was clinging to, some impossible phantasm, his last best hope. Born poor as dirt in the crowded, filthy, coal-burning tenements of the East End, parents both dead by the time he was ten, and him with Penny to take care of. She followed him everywhere, whether he worked as a costermonger's brat or as a newsie-lad, scraping by enough to feed her. But the ice on the Thames had been too thin that winter, and his little sister went under, and she was dead too, like everyone else in his world, and which he expected to be shortly. Dead in debtor's prison, dead in the workhouse, dead in the gutter, it didn't make no difference, just that he would, indeed, be quite dead. Either way, he'd had no reason to live, and hadn't cared much neither.

But then, Ana.

Will grimaced. She had to stay out of his head; he had a job to do, and he'd not appreciate the distraction. He supposed he had to thank her, in a sad sort of way. If she hadn't stabbed him in the back, broke his heart, passed herself off as _Lady_ Anastasia, married that Russian duke, and faffed off to who-knew-bloody-where, then he wouldn't have met the Captain in a Cheapside tavern (having already been kicked out of the secretive guild of thieves called the Merry Men, back when he was trying to steal enough to give Ana the luxury she wanted, and look how damned well _that_ had gone). Wouldn't have signed on aboard the good airship _Jolly Roger,_ and hence joined the most notorious crew of pirates in the British Empire. Wouldn't be here stealing the last thing, he hoped, he'd ever have to steal.

He had to be getting close. The booths here were darker and less flashy, sober and drab, the hallmark of true power. So far as Will had heard, the Royal Society of English Magicians had had to have their collective arms vigorously twisted to agree to contribute to the Great Exhibition at all. Secretive bastards, jealously guarding their power and their mystery and the fact that _they_ truly ruled England, not Her Majesty the Queen and not Lord John Russell and not any of them. As it had been since aether was discovered in Italy during the Renaissance, and the spymaster Walsingham sent agents to bring this new power back to England for Queen Elizabeth, since it was used to help defeat the Armada, since the School of Night and the Star Chamber and the Invisible College all fought to control and dominate it, pulling strings and intriguing at politics and backroom deals, cutting throats and stealing secrets, magic reigned over Britain. They had even, over the objections of the Church, gotten it taught in Oxford and Cambridge. Not that Will really knew or cared what those were aside from a bunch of bloody toffs and wankers who could be reliably counted on to not take a joke, but it did lend some perspective as to just who he was attempting to rip off. _Turning me into a toad would be the least of it._

There were only a few people at the smallest and plainest booth of all, which was a complication. Nonetheless, he strolled nonchalantly into the line, then into the darkroom beyond, where a few unimpressive artifacts were on display. The Royal Society had evidently wagered that if they made their contribution as deadly dull as possible, everyone would lose interest and go back to the bejeweled dancers of Bengal and the horologists animating the clockwork man and the machine that made moving daguerrotypes – a wager which, from the looks of things, had been exceedingly successful. Not much security, nothing like was at the Koh-i-Noor. Just a bored-looking guard, trying to read a penny dreadful in between making sure that no one had made off with the bloody magical hairpins or whatever it was. That, or so it very much seemed, was it.

Will began to hope that this was going to be easier than he thought. He reached into his right-hand pocket and fingered the marble-sized object there, drew it out, and rolled it around his palm. Then, when the few other visitors had drifted out and the guard was buried behind his penny dreadful again – _The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,_ what sort of stupid title was that? – he threw it.

At once, a choking, complete blackness sprang up, and there was a surprised yelp as the guard fell off his stool. Springing over him, Will pulled the other marble from his left-hand pocket (he had gone over it a dozen times so as not to be a complete nincompoop and get it backwards) and lobbed it, hearing a hiss and crunch as the display-case glass dissolved into dust. Then he vaulted into it, able to see only by the faint golden motes of aether sparking and igniting in the air, as he grappled around, deftly detached the simple clasp, and scooped the item in question – a heavy gold-rimmed compass – into his pocket. Knowing he had only a minute left in the darkness, if that, he jumped out the side, picked the direction least encumbered by crowds, and scarpered.

Shouts of "Stop! Thief!" began to break out behind him, as he reached the Turkey-carpet exhibit, dodged into it, then had a bright idea, got on the floor, and rolled like a haunch of mutton turned on the spit, whizzing under the feet of startled carpet aficionados who jumped out of the way with exclamations of alarm. Bolted upright on the far side, whipped a hot, lard-dripping bridie out of the hand of a large gentleman about to bite into it, dodged said gentleman's walking-stick, and kept on running until he could see one of the gates up ahead. Hurtled the stile like a track-and-field champion, into the trees of Hyde Park beyond, then into the darkening streets, the red-faced boys just going round with lantern and ladder to fire the gaslamps.

Will forced himself to slow to a walk, navigating the still-crowded lanes and wynds, darting into a shop and waiting as a brigade of peelers ran past shouting, then emerging and switching directions, as around him the folk of Westminster filtered into supper clubs and saloons, card-tables and coffeehouses, theatres and hurdy-gurdy halls. He didn't _think_ anyone had got a particularly good look at him, but it would still behoove him to go underground. Literally.

Someone else, someone else not born and raised here, would have lost their bearings in the dark, mazelike warrens, but Will could have navigated them with both eyes shut. If all else failed, he could always follow the stink of the river, until at last he emerged on the bank, could see Big Ben rising spectral into the underside of the clouds, bells booming the hour over the crooked, cluttered rooftops. But the bridge was just ahead, and there was a door in the piling that led into the tunnel system. Once he got down there he'd be safe enough (well, as safe as one could ever be) and then laugh his arse off at the dimwits going in circles trying to find –

"GOT YOU NOW, BOY!"

Oh, bloody hell.

Will dodged and spun this way and that, backed onto the bridge. Blinking hard, he saw that what he had taken for a passing pack of stray dogs was no such thing. Too bloody big, for a start, and too bloody vicious, bared fangs dripping in slaver, straining at the chains their handlers were barely keeping hold of – wolves. They had sodding _wolves._ Werewolves, if the rumors in the Night Market were anything to credit, but no matter what sort of wolves they were, Will Scarlet did not like them. Especially now, when they were being released to tear him limb from limb.

Jaws snapped an inch away from his throat. He ran to the railing and leapt out into thin air, remembering to point his toes and hold his nose for the twenty-foot drop into filthy, fetid water. Swam madly around to the piling, jerking at the rusted-shut door, even as heavy splashes behind him announced that the wolves had followed him in. Could see the monstrous great beasts paddling closer, dodged again and felt pain red-hot in his shoulder, even as he was wrenching madly at the damned door, he wasn't going to die floating like a turd in the Thames, he was _not,_ not like every other ne'er-do-well that was good riddance to bad rubbish –

With a shriek of eroded hinges, the door gave, and Will propelled himself madly through it, the wolves still snapping and snarling at his feet as he fell headlong into the damp blackness of the tunnel, as they kept pawing and growling and clawing with an altogether hideous racket, but couldn't get down after him. He slammed the grate and wedged it firmly fast, but knew it wouldn't hold the buggers long. Though if they were smart, rather than risking their own necks, they'd just set up a stakeout at the tunnel mouth and wait for him to climb out, as he had to eventually. Nets and chains and dragged to the gallows at Tyburn, and heave-ho and so long for poor old Will Scarlet, everybody try not to cry their eyes out over his grave.

Head ringing, Will descended the ladder, blood trickling from his shoulder, until the sounds from above had finally gone quiet and he was well deep in the sewer tunnels. The stench seared the lining off his nose, but you got used to it quick; it wasn't that much worse than the rest of London, really. He'd find a side tunnel, stay out of the reach of the rats (he swore the damned things smelled weakness like sharks), and hope the peelers and their wretched wolves didn't know all the entrances to the tunnels. Could climb out of one on the far side of the city, book it, and hope he still made the rendezvous. Captain would be none too pleased if he didn't.

Three days was starting to sound like a rather unpleasantly long time indeed.

He slept a bit, uncomfortably crammed onto a narrow catwalk above the depths of the black river below, hearing skittering small feet pass every now and then, water dripping down the barnacled walls; he was mostly under the Thames here, never liked being near it for that long. Penny's ghost still watched him with damp hair and disconsolate eyes, her voice whispering to him from the bitter watches of the night. He contrived a makeshift bandage for his shoulder so it wouldn't keep bleeding all over the damned place. _At least I still have the compass, eh?_ he thought resentfully. _Wouldn't want me dying before I could hand it over._

In too much pain to actually drop under for long, he waited until he could hear distant noises from topside, the pipes rattling and whooshing, heralding that it must be morning. Uncurled from his perch and weighed his options. He knew a few tricks down here. He'd make it. Somehow.

As long as he stayed relatively near where he'd gone down, he could mark time by the muffled booms of Big Ben echoing into the ground. But he had to venture deeper to find the sewer-folk, trade them the various other things he'd nicked in exchange for food. Queer ghost-white creatures in rags with eyes that had a disturbing habit of looking in different directions, scavenging the treasures that fell into London's sewers; they had a whole world down here. He didn't starve at least, though he was none too comfortable about it, counting off the hours, until it was time to commence the long sunless journey through the tunnels. _Should give me a flag to plant, like a conquerin' hero._

Will splashed and sloshed and swore his way through the muck, smelling worse and worse with every stride, reaching obsessively into his pocket as if in fear the compass would have disappeared, tore-up shoulder aching something fierce, thinking that he would be well within his rights to demand double the share of the profits after the ordeal he'd gone through. Here and there were marks on the sewer walls, indicating how far it was to the various tunnel mouths, and he chose the one that led in the direction of the West India Docks, five miles east along the embankment, where the _Roger_ was supposed to be arriving before the day was out. Any other man might have chosen a private and out-of-the-way place to land his airship, given as he _was_ the most wanted pirate in the Empire, but then, most men weren't the Captain. He had a long-standing arrangement with the port master that the authorities would either conveniently forget to note his arrival, or every once in a while spot him, mount valiant pursuit, then lose him in the fog, or write down the name – _Red Beauty –_ under which the vessel had legitimate papers at a Mr. Darling's barrister firm. Either way, it had proved vastly profitable for both the Captain and the embezzling port master. At least till one of them got nabbed, Will supposed. Odds were on the latter.

At last, breathing as if he'd been chased by a bloody train, he wearily hauled himself into the Docks tunnel and climbed up, hand over hand, to the surface. Pushed the door cautiously ajar in expectation of wolves promptly buggering down it to eat his arse, but there were none.

Muttering a hearty prayer of thanks to whichever luckless sod's job it was to be the patron saint of thieves, Will heaved himself out, lay on his back wheezing gently, clutched his pocket once more just to be sure, then rolled over and lurched to his feet. He had emerged under a quay at the busiest port in London, crowded both with the merchant steamships that sailed to Africa, India, the Caribbean, America, and returned fat with trade, and the Royal Navy airships that plied the skies. He had heard that the Captain used to be a Naval officer, a commissioned lieutenant, but had deserted some years past, some nasty bit of business Will had mostly gleaned in muttered gossip from the crew, about losing his elder brother and then all his faith in the British Empire whatsoever. Surely he had a special animus for them; if one was in range, they would track, capture, and destroy, no matter what. The waters off England were scattered with the wreckage of airships the _Roger_ had shot down from the skies.

Will began to trot along the docks, where nobody spared him a second glance. Apparently the peelers hadn't been able to distribute his precise description, though surely the news was getting round that some idiot with a death wish had burgled the Royal Society's booth in the Exhibition. Likely someone had gotten the chop for it already; they weren't supposed to include objects of actual value where they could possibly be pilfered, so to do this was a bloody massive –

Unless, it occurred to Will suddenly and most unpleasantly, they hadn't made a mistake at all. This all could be, now that he thought it over, a careful and subtle setup. Get the lads to pinch some worthless bit of junk, nothing the Society would miss, move one of their flunkeys into place as the purported buyer, then spring the trap. Nothing else had sufficed to catch the Captain yet, and though he was usually excellent at sensing when things weren't right, this mission had seemed downright personal to him, as if there was nothing he'd stop at, no risk he wouldn't take. In such a case, he might be overlooking his gut in favor of a chance at revenge.

It was something to mention, that was all. If he could do it without his head being bit off, the Captain not being the most reasonable man when it came to hearing sense. Will ducked into a shabby little pub at the end of the docks, ordered a drink, and settled in to wait, keeping a weather eye on the door. He had just an hour or two more to pass without dying, that was all, though the alcohol on an empty stomach was fast going to his head, and his shoulder was beginning to sniff a bit queer. It hurt when he lifted his right arm, so he used his left instead. Not much longer. There were bandages and unguents on the ship, he'd patch himself up proper then.

Time crawled by like a dead snail. The bells began to call the next hour, and the shadows were getting long. At dusk, the Captain had said, darkness being the state preferred for these sorts of things. Did this qualify as dusk, Will wondered? It was colder outside every time the tavern door banged open, and his eyes were starting to burn from the low, smoky air. This was where he was supposed to wait, though. If they were still coming. If nothing had gone wrong.

Too edgy to stay sitting, he got up and shoved out, standing on the rain-slick stones and listening to the dull drone of airships in the clouds above, emerging like phantoms and gliding down to dock, the great silk zeppelins hissing as the gas was drained. They'd have to be pumped up with a fresh supply before they took off again, but no matter the bother, it was safer than keeping them filled; one stray spark could level the entire Docks. Beneath the zeppelins, which served them in place of sails, the airships were elegant vessels with decks and windows and figureheads, courtly and old-fashioned, more comfortable and refined than the steamships. The aether freighters, the ones that carried barrels of the magical golden dust from the mines up North here to England, were loaded with guns to discourage privateers, while the plainer, faster Navy cruisers were loaded with guns for the same reason. _Though the Roger is fastest, and has the most guns._ Will took a certain pride in that. They'd never yet been defeated in an aerial dogfight. At least until now.

Bloody hell, it was past dark. Where _were_ they? He tried to quash the foreboding in his gut, unable to imagine his future if the _Roger_ and her captain had finally met the end of their luck, and he was left here with stolen goods and the entire Royal Society after him. Run and run like hell, defect to the Russian Empire who would be delighted to have an English spy, try not to think about Ana and her bloody Russian duke who were doubtless very fucking happy in their –

"Hsst! _Scarlet!"_

Will jumped nearly out of his skin as a short, stout man in a red woolen cap materialized from the shadows and waved at him: William Smee, the _Roger's_ first mate, holding a dark lantern and clearly in a bloody hurry. While he'd never liked Smee all that much, the man having a generally ratty air that seemed to promise any trust in him would be misplaced, he was abjectly grateful to clap eyes on him now, and broke into a run across the cobbles as Smee ushered him down mossy steps to where a small rowboat was waiting, bobbing in the black water. Both of them applying themselves to the oars with vigor, they reversed out, slipped into the wake of a steamship passing the entrance lock, just barely avoided being crushed as the lock rolled shut behind them, and sculled into the fast-running Thames. Neither of them said anything, knowing how sound carried and focused on their escape, until they hauled up near Greenwich Pier, tied the boat, and waited tensely.

A few moments later, Will heard the thrumming overhead, and glanced up just in time to see a low-flying, spectral black shape block out the chilly stars. A rope ladder dropped, and Smee bolted for it first, naturally. Will jumped up behind him, feeling the airship already starting to lift off again, so that he was swinging ten and then twenty and thirty feet above the ground as he kept climbing, determinedly not looking down; heights were not his especial favorite thing in the world. But the dark bulk of the _Roger_ loomed reassuringly above him, closer and closer even as London continued to fall away below, and soon he was scrambling up over the side, grasping hold of the rail, and somersaulting at full length on the deck.

He lay there, gulping air, thinking that he'd very much like his supper and his bunk now, until another shadow fell over him in the gloom; they'd fly dark until they were well clear of the city. Boots measured a steady pace up to his head, then stopped, and the Captain looked down at him as if Will were a mildly interesting bit of rubbish they'd dredged up in a fishing net. "Scarlet."

"Cap'n." Will got himself pointed more or less the right way up, still panting. "Got it."

A grin curled the Captain's mouth, lending him even more of a debonair, roguish air than usual. He was that sort of man, the sort that made all the ladies (and not a few of the blokes) stop dead in their tracks: lean and dark-haired and blue-eyed, with a penchant for long leather jackets and sheer black shirts and inadequately buttoned vests, rings and necklaces and kohl, high boots and the basket-handled sword he always wore low on his hip, the bloody walking definition of the word "swashbuckler." But though he had the look of a pretty boy, nobody called him that to his face. In place of his missing left hand, the Captain wore the lethally sharp steel appendage that gave him his name: Hook. He could smile and charm you and dice with you and drink with you and pick you bloody clean of your valuables before you had the foggiest what was going on, but you insulted or crossed or challenged him at your peril. Not if you didn't want to find it buried between your eyes. So Will had been told, at least, but not being a shy sort by nature, he rarely held back when he had something to say, and hence he and the Captain tended to sauce each other something fierce. It was an unspoken agreement, though he always knew where the boundaries were. He thought Hook liked him, a bit. Much as the bastard liked anyone.

"So," Hook said, stepping closer and holding out his good hand. "I'll take it now."

For an instant Will was tempted to refuse, or at least fill the Captain in on the trouble he'd gone through to get it, but wanted food and sleep more than he wanted to spend the night in the brig, and fished it out of his pocket. "I'm fine as well, thanks for asking."

Hook cocked a sardonic eyebrow. "We'd have all been heartbroken if you fell in the line of duty. Grave in the Abbey, a week of national mourning, the lot. Eh?"

"I'm not that fussed, I'd take a knighthood and call it done," Will shot back. "Sir William Scarlet, the ladies would be swoonin' left and right. Permission to leave duty, sir?"

"Granted," Hook said with a careless wave, tucking the compass into the pocket of his vest – but not before covetously stroking his thumb over it, staring down at it as if it was precisely what he'd been waiting for all this time. And once more, Will had to wonder what exactly, if anything, he knew about this entire damned affair. If they _were_ still going to sell it, if they were going to be rich men, or if perhaps everyone involved had no clue what was really happening save the Captain. _Double-crosser double-crosses everyone, likely I'm no bloody different._

In which case, Will thought as he trudged off to the crew's quarters, glancing back at the dark silhouette still standing by the rail as they climbed into the clouds, they'd best take especial care. The Captain had outrun and outsailed all sorts of storms in his day, but whatever this was, whatever it meant, whether they'd survive thumbing the Empire's most powerful and dangerous men straight in the bloody eye, one such as they had never seen was coming.

And it was coming now.


	2. Chapter 2

As she disembarked from the hansom cab, Emma Swan pulled her hood closer, pressed a few coins on the driver clearly more than anxious to leave, and crossed to the black iron gates that loomed in the mist-wet morning, the sumptuous brick estate waiting down the drive beyond. When she had told him to take her to Kensington Palace, he laughed disbelievingly – then, realizing she was serious, spent the trip shooting her dour glances from his perch on the running board, clearly wondering just how dangerous she could be. Considerably, it so happened, though not to him. She'd come only lightly armed, knowing that she would have to relinquish it before being allowed into the magician's inner sanctum, but there was still a pearl-handled derringer strapped to her thigh (no proper gentleman would be looking _there_ ) and a stiletto in her sleeve. She supposed it was best to demonstrate what he was paying for.

The gates swung open at her approach, and Emma strode up the drive, holding her skirts daintily out of the puddles, until she stepped under the massive white-columned portico. By personal appointment of Her Majesty, this was the official London residence of the President of the Royal Society of English Magicians – perhaps not an entirely unqualified honor, as the Queen was known to harbor strong feelings against Kensington and the repressive, tyrannical regime that her mother the Duchess of Kent and Sir John Conroy had enforced upon her there during her childhood – and Emma rang the bell, then waited. This wasn't the strangest place she'd been, or the most dangerous, but she'd have to mind her manners.

After a moment, the door opened – again with no discernible human intervention – revealing a long, dim, lushly carpeted entrance foyer, an unlit chandelier draping crystal branches from the white-sculpted ceiling. The design tended toward the baroque and rococo, ornate and elegant and gold-filigreed, though most of it was surprisingly dull and dusty. It had the feeling of an old, shut-up museum, the air heavy and quiet, a grand staircase leading off into the gloom. Various objects were hung on the walls or displayed in glass cases. Her patron – not surprising, given his position – was clearly a connoisseur of the rare and unusual, and Emma glanced from side to side, casually examining the knick-knacks. There seemed to be nothing else to do, just now.

At last, she heard footsteps, and a young maid in a blue dress emerged, caught sight of Emma, and dropped a brief, correct curtsy. "Welcome to Kensington, miss. May I take your cloak?"

"I suppose." Emma held out her arms. "Is the butler ill?"

"There is no butler, miss." The maid looked wry, opening a closet and stowing the cloak inside; a strong smell of camphor floated out. "Only me. The master is not a man for company."

"I noticed." Emma waited as the maid picked up a candelabra, then led her to the back of the house. She wondered if the young woman had to tend this entire estate by herself, as a reclusive magician was likely not the most fastidious of housekeepers, but she hadn't come for small-time gossip with the help. Then they stepped through into an expansive, appropriately magisterial study, with a fire crackling in the hearth, dark mahogany paneling, shelves of gilt-stamped books, and the heavy scrolled desk behind which a man sat, back turned to her. He wore his greying-brown hair long and shaggy, in defiance of the custom for fashionable short coifs, and if it were not for the expensively cut and tailored suit (Savile Row beyond a doubt) Emma would have taken him for another servant. Or maybe she wouldn't have. He exuded an indefinable, exquisite, more than slightly dangerous aura of power and competence. Which, considering everything, must have been exactly what he wanted.

The maid cleared her throat. "Mr. Gold, sir? The lady you sent for, she's here."

For a moment, still no response. Then he spun his chair around suddenly, startling both women, and flashed an alligator smile. A man of late middle age, hooded brown eyes and slightly hooked nose, long fingers steepled before his face. "Very good. Then why don't you run along and. . . read a book, or whatever it is you like to do?"

"You should let me open the curtains," the maid informed him. "Get some light in here."

"I don't want any light in here. Leave them shut, or I'll turn you into a toad."

Even Emma had to blink, though by the tolerant, mildly exasperated look on the maid's face, this threat was a common staple in her employer's repertoire. "I think it would be nice," she persisted. "You have such a lovely collection in here. See the art better, all the – "

"You are _excused."_

The maid bobbed another curtsy, not without a bit of an eye-roll, and let herself out, as Emma slipped into the chair in front of the desk, folding her gloved hands in her lap. She waited as that gimlet eye fell on her, and he sized her up, apparently trying to decide if she was what he'd expected. Then he said, "You've proven rather hard to get hold of, dearie."

"I don't deal with subordinates." Emma remained unmoved. Every time messengers had dropped round with cryptic summons, refusing to tell her who they were working for or why, she had promptly sent them packing. When they offered to set up a meeting, she declined again unless it was with whoever was truly soliciting her services. By dint of this method, ignoring all bribes and threats and pleas to the contrary, she had finally learned that the shadowy individual with an interest in hiring her was none other than Robert Gold himself, the President of the Royal Society of English Magicians and the most powerful man in the country, if not the entire Empire. Not an opportunity to pass up, but one to treat with caution. "I've learned that lesson."

Gold smiled. "Indeed. You have. . . quite a reputation, Miss Swan. Hard to earn and easy to lose, as the saying goes. So, then, now that we have finally caught each other, I have a business proposition for you."

"I'd hope so."

"There is a job for which only the best and most successful will do," Gold went on. "The mark is most dangerous and subtle. A particular vexation, a thorn in the side of both myself and Her Majesty's realms for some time. Several days ago, an associate of his succeeded in brazenly robbing the Royal Society's booth at the Great Exhibition, and in taking an. . . object. I want it returned, make no mistake, but I am most interested in putting this villain's reign of discord and misery out of business, and swinging him by the neck for his gross and innumerable crimes. All my lesser means have failed, so I have decided to resort to a more direct approach. If you play your part, the compensation will be considerable."

"Good. I don't come cheap."

"Most things worth pursuing in life don't," the magician agreed. He got up, opened his cabinet, and removed a decanter of fine brandy, pouring them an aperitif apiece; Emma took the glass and faked an elegant sip. She never drank anything a client offered her, especially before they paid. She hadn't risen to become one of the most notorious bounty hunters in London's underworld by accident, and had made plenty of enemies along the way. Black Swan, they called her. Some were surprised to learn that she was a woman, whereas others used it signally to their advantage, and while she thought that poisoning was likely off the table at the moment, it didn't do to get out of the habit. Trusting anyone was a quick way to fall fast and far and hard.

Apparently not noticing her subterfuge, Gold returned to his chair and took a pull of his own drink. "So then," he went on. "You will be wondering the identity of your target."

"I was."

"Does the name Killian Jones mean anything to you?"

"I'm afraid it doesn't."

"Understandable. Very few people know him as such, and I don't doubt he's made sure it stays that way. You may, however, have heard of his more colorful moniker – Captain Hook."

At that, Emma had to work to keep the surprise off her face. Anyone who had spent any time in her circles had heard of the infamous pirate, star of countless urban legends, rumored to have once tried – and almost succeeded – to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower, especial scourge of the Royal Navy, with a trail that spanned the black markets and seedy backwaters of Europe, working as a mercenary for whoever had the means to pay him and ripping off the rest. There must have been a dozen death warrants out for him by now, and while Emma was well acquainted with the nature of lurid gossip, knew that he'd likely only done perhaps half of what was credited (or discredited) to him, that still made him a formidable foe. "You. . . you want me to take down _Captain Hook?"_

"That is indeed what I am proposing, dearie." Gold took another placid sip. She could hear the faint burr of his Glaswegian working-class upbringing, almost but not entirely polished away by years and years among London's most elite circles. Interesting story, he had. Something like hers: rising from nothing and fighting to become something, the best in his field there was, and never looking back to see what had been lost along the way. Doubtless the rock-ribbed Royal Society had never quite gotten over the humiliation of a self-made Scot, the son of the village drunkard rather than Lord High So-and-So, becoming their president, but considering the heights of power and influence they'd attained under his leadership, such complaints were just as likely kept to themselves. "Why? Do you fear you're not up to it?"

"Not at all." Emma gave him a demure little smile. "Only that, as I said, it's going to cost you."

"I am fully prepared for that contingency, Miss Swan, and believe that, as _I_ said, you will find my offer more than generous."

"How much are we talking?"

"I prefer not to reveal sensitive details in preliminary negotiations. Terribly sorry."

Emma raised an eyebrow, and changed the subject. "So what do you want done with him? I'm a bounty hunter, not a contract killer."

"Fear not, dearie, you won't be getting your exquisite hands dirty. . . beyond the usual, that is. I want him alive, and that's all you have to do for me. Track him down, capture him, regain possession of the artifact his accomplice stole from the Exhibition, and I'll handle the rest. The Empire has no interest in giving him a swift and easy death. An example must be made."

"You're the most powerful magician in Europe, and you and all your friends can't catch him?"

" _As_ the most powerful magician in Europe," Gold said, with a slight but sharp stress on it, "I have far better uses of my time, and demands on it, than to devote myself obsessively to the apprehension of one miscreant – however much I would like to. Besides, the pirate is not without a certain low cunning. One does not stay one step ahead of the authorities for as long as he has without some guile to match his luck, and he has become rather adept at seeing my fingerprints on things, alas. It's time for some new blood."

"If that's the case, what makes you think this will be any different?"

"Why, Miss Swan, because you are a _professional."_ Gold grinned, as if it was a private joke shared between them. "You are, aren't you? I could look into the details of your previous cases, which I am sure would be riveting reading, as well as providing me with priceless evidence on the state of the London underworld and who else, apart from Hook, I might do well to keep an eye on. But I am sure you have done nothing to prejudice the interests of the Royal Society in the past, smart woman like you, so whyever would you start now?" He leaned forward. "I don't believe you realize that you are in a position to name your price. I'll pay it. And whatever you do name, it's likely already higher than that. In addition, once you complete this job, you will be a national heroine. _Lady_ Emma Swan, how does that sound? Or does _Duchess_ tempt you more? Your needs will be seen to for the rest of your life, you can get out of this line of work – it doesn't age well, I imagine – and, ah, yes, haven't I heard something about a son?"

Emma stared at him, finally and completely thrown for the first time in the conversation. She supposed it was useless to ask how he knew that, but for obvious reasons, she had always kept Henry's existence strictly secret. She had been just seventeen, a loner girl doing her best to stay alive, and Neal Cassidy had been several years older, a fellow thief who promised to teach her the tricks of the trade. For a few months they'd been unstoppable, pulling off small-time heists all across London, and he'd taught her other things as well. Then one night he never showed, left her holding several pieces of stolen jewelry, whereupon she was caught by the constables and taken to a ladies' prison and workhouse. She didn't know if they'd have actually hanged her, and never found out, due to discovering not long later that she was going to have a baby, and no matter whatever other extremities she had to endure, they were too Christian to hang a pregnant woman, of course.

She gave birth to Henry in the Church Penitentiary Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women, a charity run by William Ewart Gladstone, MP for the University of Oxford, _fallen woman_ being apt for a description of who she was then. Given a pittance of money and urged to seek decent employment as a stenographer or a factory-girl or a laundress, but any of those occupations would buy Henry the same childhood she had: cold and deprived and miserable, growing up unwanted and alone in a country orphanage run by a Church of England parson and his spinster sister, who never missed an opportunity to remind the children of how loathsome they were in the sight of God, who might have saved their souls but destroyed everything else. She didn't want that, she couldn't stand him having that, and she didn't give a damn about being decent, not any more.

So she did what she had to do. Lady Regina Mills was a childless aristocrat whose family fortune was almost gone, who needed to repair her ancestral estate in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and who agreed to take in Henry and raise him as her own in exchange for being well paid for it. Henry had a good life, an excellent education at the local grammar school, all the opportunities and all the doors old money could open for him. Emma visited him once a year, at Easter usually, but no more. She had to stay in work constantly to pay his boarding fee, and while he knew that she was his mother and she would have him with her if she could, he was for obvious reasons more comfortable with Lady Regina, the woman he had lived with since birth. She had always cherished the foolish hope that one day she could earn enough to come and take him home with her, not remain embroiled in a dangerous and unpredictable life as a bounty hunter, but as long as it made her the sort of money that it did, she couldn't see a way to stop. Not until. . . an opportunity like this fell into her lap. She should be snatching it up with both hands. Do it, and everything she had ever wanted was hers. Just like Gold promised.

"Yes," Emma said weakly, trying to disguise how much he'd rattled her armor. "You may have."

"I thought so," the magician said. "It is a particular tribulation to be parted from our children. I have missed my own son these many years, and if I can help you be reunited with yours, surely that cannot be ill-done for either of us. What do you say, Miss Swan?"

Emma hesitated. Clients would say all sorts of things if they thought it would convince her to take the commission, but there was an unexpected note of raw honesty in Gold's voice that took her aback. Not that she expected the President of the Royal Society to do anything other than utterly wreck her life if she failed in this, but there was no reason she should think so. The Black Swan never fell prey to the same weaknesses as her peers. No mercy. No compassion. No love.

She swallowed, trying to wet her dry throat. "Mr. Gold, sir," she said formally. "I will endeavor to the utmost of my ability to do what you desire."

"Capital. Truly capital." He made a flourishing, theatrical gesture, and a scroll of parchment unrolled from nowhere, complete with a red-feathered quill which he handed to her. "Sign there, my dear, and what I expect will be a long and fruitful business partnership may commence."

Emma read the cramped, ornate cursive as quickly as she could; she'd never seen such a detailed contract, and most of her agreements were of the handshake variety anyway, her clients not being the sort interested in leaving paper trails. But the Royal Society, like the rest of the government, was a fiend for the bureaucracy; likely this form had to be copied and filed in triplicate and stamped by the proper department twice extra for good measure. The terms seemed standard enough. She consenting that she would bring to justice one Captain Killian Jones, herein referred to by his alias, Hook, and they consenting that they would take all reasonable measures to assist her in so doing, including a compensation for success totaling. . .

Emma blinked. Had to read that part over and then over again, terrified that she was dreaming. Had never seen a sum that size, had never even thought there was so much. She could live the rest of her life in high style on it, even leave some for Henry's children, perhaps invest it and make still more. Would be made a Peeress of the Realm, could appoint a representative to voice her interests in the House of Lords – all this for a penniless orphan from Boston, in Lincolnshire. The bounty was almost unbelievable, a small voice warning her that that which looked too good to be true oftentimes and bitterly was, and that those who placed their trust in magicians were nearly as unwise as those who placed it in princes – or anyone, really. But if she caught Killian Jones, Gold would have no choice but to deliver on it, and she wanted it. More than anything.

So then. It was, for once, perfectly straightforward. She had to catch him.

Not bothering to read the rest, Emma leaned forward and without a second thought, signed.

* * *

Once the magician had supplied her with a certified promissory note for the amount of her initial fee, and informed her that she would start to receive messages which it would be to her advantage to follow up on, she took her leave, and Emma rode in another cabriolet to the Bank of England on Threadneedle-street, where she changed the note into sterling, deposited most of it, and kept the rest for startup money. She supplied the Bank with enough business that they all recognized her on sight and respectfully called her "madame," and of course, discretion being a cardinal virtue in their line of work, had never asked any questions about where it came from. There was no way she was going to keep her money in her mattress, where it could be stolen or the place burned to the ground at any time, and having the Bank check the guarantees of those who paid her in paper promises was an excellent way to weed out the frauds. Indeed, she'd worked for them a few times, chasing down delinquent creditors and unlucky speculators and anyone else who incurred the Old Lady's wrath, though she had taken care that they did not know the Black Swan was the same woman as the one who stood well-dressed and perfectly well-behaved in the lobby to write out her scrips and balance her accounts. It was a nuisance, but there was certainly no way she was trusting anyone else to do it.

Financials concluded, Emma made her way out of the City to her flat in Southwark, which was on the third floor of a shabby old brownstone. She didn't want to tie herself to anywhere too costly in case the work suddenly dried up, and felt more at home in the decrepit, dark, broken-cobbled lanes of Southwark than she did in any of the high-society gilded birdcages she sometimes orbited through during her jobs. Most of them stayed in the underworld, and that suited her fine, though she supposed if she _was_ actually going to become a duchess at some point, she might have to be open to the idea of change. It wasn't as if she would actually miss this place. She never had. Every time she left somewhere, she ran and never looked back.

Inside, Emma shut the door, worked the locks, and shucked her heeled boots. Not that she was planning to stay for long. Gold had given her a tight deadline – three months – saying that he wanted Hook captured by Christmas, or her fee would be halved. If in six months she still hadn't caught him, it would drop to a quarter, and thirty days after that, be terminated completely. She knew that if that happened, it wouldn't just be chalked up as an unsuccessful investment, him shrugging, writing off his loss, and moving on to find another bounty hunter. If that happened, she'd be as just much the Royal Society's enemy as the pirate, Gold rendering her unemployable and unwanted anywhere she turned. After a life of it, knowing that this was it, make or break, the prospect clutched her throat shut.

Emma padded into her bedroom, a drafty garret jammed kitty-corner against the front room, and stripped off her wet clothes. At not quite thirty, she was still a considerably attractive woman, with all her white teeth and long, lustrous blonde hair, wide green eyes, ample curves, and a trim, hourglass figure. Her skin was kept fashionably pale, though more from her long nights and underground days than any particular effort on her part, and she did not yet want to smash the mirror or turn to stone when she looked into it, so the effect remained satisfactory. But the proof was in the pudding, and she knew that the overwhelming majority of her marks found it satisfactory as well. That usually tended to be the last thing they ever did, at least until they woke confused, cuffed, and in custody of whoever had been looking for them in the first place.

Emma took the comb off the washstand and pulled out the knots in her hair, rinsing it with the rosemary-chamomile tincture that kept it sleek and shiny, shivering as she poured the cold water into the porcelain basin. Took a cloth and scrubbed everywhere else, with the fine-milled tallow soap she kept for such purposes, then dried briskly.

She was almost finished when there was a sharp rap on her door, so she pulled on a dressing gown and went to investigate. But there was no one there except for a thick parchment envelope which had been pushed through the letter slot, sealed with a fat dollop of golden wax. Opened, it proved to be a dossier of public records, bulletins from the London _Times,_ and copies of forms and warrants pertaining to the infamous criminal Killian Jones – more information than she'd expected Gold to be forthcoming with, in fact, and she raised an eyebrow. Maybe he actually meant to cooperate with her in good faith, which would significantly ease the process.

Sinking onto the divan, Emma flipped through the pages. Killian Jones, former Lieutenant of His Majesty's Royal Navy – he'd deserted in 1837 at the age of eighteen, when King William died and his teenage niece Victoria ascended the throne. It seemed to be related to the death of his brother, Captain Liam Jones, who had served as a decorated commander for near ten years and never offered anything but good and loyal duty to the Empire; clearly, the fraternal apple had fallen very far from the tree. The faithless younger brother had stolen the Navy airship of the line under his command and repurposed it as a pirate vessel, quickly rising to prominence as an irksome but fairly inconsequential thief and brigand, not much different from the usual class of scum and villainy.

Here, however, the record went mysteriously silent. There were a few scattered notices reporting that the pirate had been spotted here or there, and concerned citizens should do their patriotic duty by turning him in for a substantial reward, but apart from a mention of him being convicted in absentia as a traitor for smuggling weapons to the rebels during the 1848 revolts, nothing else. The uprisings had been swiftly quashed before they could overturn Europe, and pardons generally offered to those who had escaped with their lives, but now, three years later, the conviction for Killian Jones still stood. Which hinted someone high in the government had a personal hatred for him, and Emma was wagering her best petticoat that she knew who.

Still, though. There was nothing to explain how a young, disaffected ex-lieutenant had become the dreaded Captain Hook, just why Gold loathed him so much, or where she should even start looking for him. Going through the articles mentioning his appearances, however, it struck her that he was turning up in London quite a bit more often than would be expected for the Empire's bête noire, which suggested either that he was stupendously arrogant about not being caught – or that he had some kind of arrangement with the port authorities somewhere.

This was usually how her cases began, with a hunch. Putting the papers down, Emma returned to her room and changed into a clean dress. It was getting late in the day, but that suited her well enough; where she went was usually after hours and after dark, and she was used to being out long into the night. Not without due precautions, of course. Apart from her derringer and stiletto, she carried an ivory-handled, long-barreled revolver, extra powder and shot, a hunting knife, a silver throwing star, an ampule of holy water, and a vessel of salt. Emma had only crossed paths with the darkest denizens of London's underworld once before, and devoutly hoped she never did again, but she always expected the worst and therefore prepared for it.

Dress, cloak, bonnet, and boots accounted for, Emma collected her parasol (the tip was also silver and very sharp, to be used in a pinch) and departed, crossing the river back into Westminster, through Piccadilly Circus and into Marylebone, to Harley Street and its long march of drab, respectable Georgian rowhouses. Each was the model of discretion, with only small signs in the windows to advertise that this was the heart of London's medical practice, with physicians trained to treat all sorts of disorders – from the mundane to the magical to, it was rumored, the monstrous. Emma mounted the steps of one such establishment – _A. Hopper, M.D., University of Edinburgh_ tidily hand-calligraphed under the bell. She ignored it, let herself in, and down the hall. He'd still be seeing patients. Renowned as London's expert on hysterical and nervous disorders, he did his genuine best to treat the mostly young women who were referred to him. If he failed, Emma knew, they were sent to the asylum. It was rare they came out again.

She took a seat on the davenport, waiting until the last patient of the day had departed, and Dr. Hopper wandered out. A tall, storklike, gentle man with receding ginger hair and round spectacles, clad in his usual tweed suit with the elbow patches and rumpled cravat, he was just locking his office door and humming tunelessly when Emma stood up. "Hello, Archie."

"Miss Sw – _Emma?"_ He spun around, gawking. "I didn't see you! What are you doing here?"

"The usual." Emma plucked the key from his hand and smiled beguilingly. Archibald Hopper had lending privileges at libraries, archives, and universities across London, and those where he didn't, he knew someone who did. Whenever she needed a paper trail started, he was her man, and one of the very few that she trusted. He knew that his patients were often neither insane nor dangerous, and Emma knew it as well, but they often ran into difficulties making the women's families and the asylum doctors agree. She, remembering what it was like being held against her will for someone else's crime, had helped spirit many of the young women away in the night, to new lives in France or Flanders or anywhere else their families could not find them. In exchange for this service, Archie helped with documents and research and on occasion, always protesting vociferously, would supply her a patient's records. He said it was a breach of medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath, but Emma reminded him that in her view, so was what the asylum did to the young women, and she could stop helping them get away if he was so concerned about it. That was usually sufficient to shut him up.

In any event, realizing that his hot supper was going to have to wait, Archie let out a resigned sigh. "What do you need, Emma?"

"This." She produced one of the furled, yellowing notices from her sleeve. "I want to know what happened to it."

Archie took it, pushed his spectacles up his nose, and squinted nearsightedly at the smudged black type. "HMS _Jewel of the Realm,"_ he read, sounding baffled. "Formerly under the command of Captain Liam Jones, tragically deceased in the line of duty during the 1837 Canadian Rebellion. Stolen by Lieutenant Killian Jones (dishonorably discharged) and placed under pirate colors. Further fate unknown. Emma, what are you – "

"It's for a job. I want you to see if you can find out if she's sailing under a new name, if – Lieutenant Jones – scuppered her somewhere and got a different ship, and if so, what. The records would be in the Admiralty, wouldn't they? In Whitehall?"

Archie rubbed a hand across his face, still looking astonished. "I don't precisely have an occasion to go strolling into the Admiralty every day, Emma."

"I'm sure you can think of something." She fluttered her eyelashes a bit. Despite his line of work, Archie was a confirmed bachelor and got exceedingly flustered every time anything female expressed the remotest non-professional interest in him. This was professional, of course, but she suddenly had an idea. "If I was the wife of a Naval officer, and I was having some sort of hysterical episode, you might have to go to the Admiralty to inquire where my husband was posted. It's not inconceivable that he could have served on the _Jewel_ fifteen or so years ago, before it turned pirate. Then they'd have to open that file."

Archie raised an eyebrow. "Notwithstanding, of course, the minor fact that you _aren't_ the wife of a Naval officer."

"Nobody has to know that, do they?"

"Then what? Am I supposed to just pluck a name out of the air and hope they had the good fortune of firstly, existing, secondly, serving in the Royal Navy, and thirdly, on this particular ship? Which appears to be a scandal of some sort, so when I ask after it, they'll – "

"I doubt the pen-pushers at Whitehall are going to be terribly interested in one lost ship from a decade and a half ago. And as for a name, we _do_ have one." She crossed her arms. "Jones."

Archie's dubious expression didn't alter. "As in the dead captain and the dishonorably discharged lieutenant? Which one are they more likely to believe you're married to?"

"That's not as important. Just that you get a look at the file. And besides, it's not as if I'm looking for someone named Rumplestiltskin. You can sneeze in London and blow away half a dozen Joneses, so the odds are good that there was at least one other aboard. If not, you can always claim that you must have been mistaken. Understood?"

"I suppose so." The doctor sighed. "I'm still not sure about this, Emma, but for you, I'll try. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to run down to the cellars and see to – "

"The cellars?" Emma frowned at him. "See to what?"

"Ah. . ." Archie's face froze. "Minor, very minor, nothing to – "

"Is there something down there? Some _one?"_

"No, of course not, certainly not." His eyes skated in either direction, flatly belying his attempted nonchalance. "I don't want to keep you from your errands, you must be very – "

"Archie." Emma slid sideways, planting herself in his path. "Tell me what you're doing, right now."

"I. . ." He blew out a breath. "It is a matter of treatment for one of my patients, which is all I feel obligated to disclose at the moment. Now, if you would kindly – "

"You're keeping a woman in the _cellar?"_ She had never taken him for the type, and jerked back in revulsion. "Archie, I can't believe – "

"Shh!" He glanced around, as if in fear someone else might have heard her speaking, but his secretary had left as well, and they were alone. "It's not what you think. It's very delicate, and very important that you tell no one, do you understand?"

"Then what is it?"

He eyed her suspiciously for a moment more. Then sighed deeply, and crossed the room to the bookcases on the far side. Reached in to trip some hidden catch, and waited as a counterweight swung and the bookcases floated up as if weightless, revealing a dark passage beyond, steps that led underground. Clearly realizing that he was not going to get away with his secret any longer, he sighed again and beckoned her in, then stepped in after her, pressing the catch and lowering the bookcases back into place, engulfing them in near-total darkness.

Emma descended step by step, hands blindly outstretched, until her eyes adjusted and she reached the bottom, could make out the dim contours of an underground passage. Water dripped, the ground was soft and damp underfoot, and her voice echoed eerily. "Archie, what in the. . .?"

Ducking out of the stairwell after her, brushing dirt off his bald spot, he pressed a finger to his lips, took an oil lantern off a peg, and struck a match to light it. Then they set off along the passage, around a corner and then another, somewhere deep under the foundations of the house. Then emerged in a small, low-ceilinged room – a priest hole, Emma could have sworn, although she'd never have imagined that the staunchly Presbyterian, Lowland Scot Archibald Hopper would harbor a secret desire to help fugitive Catholics (especially disliked by the Royal Society due to the Pope having condemned magic and all who wielded it as servants of Lucifer) leave the country. Even after the demonstrations earlier in the year, when Pius had tried to proclaim England once more Catholic in hopes of saving its soul from demons, and the people remembered just why they hated Popery so much. But this, to be sure, was not a priest. Indeed, a young woman, dark-haired, wearing a tattered paisley dress and –

"Archie!" Emma grabbed the doctor's arm, her other hand flying to her silver throwing star. "Christ! She's a wolf!"

The young woman flinched and bit her lip, but said nothing to deny it. She couldn't. It was the eyes that always gave away the children of the moon: feral, golden, black-pupiled, shining with their own faint, lucent light. She looked harmless enough, but Emma's first (and thankfully to date, last) encounter with one of her kind had sharply taught the fallacy of that idea. And Archie was just keeping her here, completely unchained, as if –

"I know," the doctor said hastily. "You – you can put that away, Emma, we don't need it."

"You _know?"_ Emma blinked at him, stunned. She didn't put the throwing star away entirely, but eased her grip somewhat. "And you think letting her roam around is a good idea?"

"She is one of my patients." Archie assumed that stubbornly noble look he got sometimes. "If the asylum knew about her, they would. . ."

"Drag her off and put her down," Emma finished grimly. "No questions asked."

"Or they'd make me join them." The young woman spoke for the first time, shuddering. "They're recruiting us, you know. The Royal Society. They want to control us, use us as their brute squad. But I – I'm not a killer. I'm not!"

"I know," Archie said gently. "Remember, we've discussed this. There is a way to control this, to treat it, and we'll find it."

"Archie. . ." Emma frowned at him. "Don't give her false hope. There's no cure for lycanthropy."

"Not if you're born a wolf, no. As she was." Archie tilted his head at his patient. "But if you're attacked by one, you can avoid turning if you're treated before the next full moon. Not to mention, there are plenty of examples in the case literature of werewolves who were able to control their actions both as human and wolf. Ruby – this is Ruby, by the way, Ruby Lucas – Ruby, Emma, Emma, Ruby – is just scared. She doesn't want to hurt anyone."

"I'm sure she doesn't. But how do you explain that?" Emma indicated the deep scratches and scars in the silver grate on the far side of the room, which was apparently used to contain (or try to contain) Ruby during her transformations. That and the rest of the torn-up corridor, making her wonder if the wolf could climb the stairs and rip down the bookshelf, possibly escape from the house into London. "Archie. . . I know you want to believe the best of people. But she – "

"What am I supposed to do? Let the asylum kill her or let the Royal Society turn her into a slave?" The doctor set his jaw. "People can change, Emma. People can be rehabilitated. That's what Ruby is. She's a person. The wolf just happens to be part of her – a wild and dangerous part, yes, but we all have our flaws."

"I hope your insistence doesn't get your throat torn out," Emma said with a sigh, then glanced guiltily at the young woman. "No offense."

"None taken." Ruby fiddled with a thread in her sleeve. "I used to have a red cloak, it was magical, it stopped me from turning, but I don't know what happened to it. Now I turn and I don't know how to control it, and I. . . Archie, have I killed anyone?"

The doctor hesitated – just long enough for Emma, who had one small skill that was a boon in her line of work, an ability to tell when someone was lying – to taste the untruth in his words. "No. Of course not."

Emma bit her tongue, sensing that her correction would not be welcomed, but at the same time, not particularly comfortable about being in a confined, dark, underground space with a killer wolf, even considering her bristling arsenal of weaponry. She _had_ heard that the Royal Society and the Metropolitan Police were using werewolves now, and this was in fact the only legitimate occupation under which a child of the moon could remain in London. There were packs that ran wild in desolate, remote areas such as the Welsh marches and the Yorkshire moors, but there were few places in the British Isles where the creatures were welcomed, no matter how much of a productive citizen they were in their human form for twenty-nine out of thirty days of the month. For that one night – and more, if you could shift at will as it was rumored the older wolves could – the danger was too great. As a result, trapped in the filth and fog and squalor of the city, bedeviled by the presence of silver and iron, and brutalized by the masters who saw them as wild beasts deserving of the same colonial savagery, most wolves were insane, opium or absinthe-addicted, and soon dead anyway.

At the thought, a small, unwelcome prick of sympathy for Ruby managed to worm through, touching Emma like a cold finger on the back of her neck. She shrugged it away; she hadn't come here to help Archie on another of his mercy missions. Maybe if he successfully tracked down the new name and whereabouts of the _Jewel,_ she'd owe him a favor, but not until then. Gold and his job – his _paid_ job – came first. Ruby would just have to try to avoid killing anyone else until then. Shut up here was likely the safest place for her and everyone.

"Well," Emma said, clearing her throat, as Archie appeared inclined to sit down and stay a while. "I'll just be going, then. I'll be back at the end of the week for those. . . papers we discussed."

"Papers?" Archie blinked as if it had completely slipped his mind, then remembered, and nodded. "Oh, yes, yes of course."

"Sooner," Emma prodded. "If possible."

"Yes, I'll do my best. Good evening, Emma."

Sensing that she was being dismissed, Emma nodded back, and showed herself through the muddy tunnel to the staircase. She climbed up, out of the bookcase, and stepped out into the early evening, cabs and horses and pedestrians jockeying by on Harley Street as the practices closed their doors for the night. Even though she had one lead in motion, that was never enough, and the last thing she wanted to do was go home and sit by herself in her cold, grimy flat with the cracked plaster walls and leaking ceiling. Besides, this was when her usual haunts were just beginning to come to life. She checked the sky; the sun was below the horizon, dusk unfolding over the spires and steeples of London, and that meant the Night Market would be opening for business. Once more ensuring that all armaments were in place, Emma set off.

She was waiting for a cumbersome coach-and-six to clear the street (being pelted with a ripe hail of verbal abuse from the other drivers) when she felt a tug on her sleeve, and glanced down to see a cherub-faced, soot-smeared paper boy hopefully brandishing his wares at her. "Evenin' news, ma'am? The lady like the evenin' news? The scandal at the Exhibition, readallaboutit!"

Emma opened her mouth to refuse – then caught sight of the headlining story. **SCANDAL AT THE EXHIBITION:** _ **Thievery**_ ** & **_**Terror**_ **As Lone Madman Strikes!** Underneath, there was a grainy daguerreotype made by the new moving-pictures machine, capturing a three-quarters profile of a man sprinting through the halls of the Crystal Palace, face almost in view – but not quite. Over and over, the black-and-white little figure made a mad dash for freedom, outraged citizens trailing on his heels but never quite managing to catch him, as he leapt a barrier and vanished from the frame. As Emma watched, it started again from the beginning, and she peered at it intently, hoping he might turn his head just a bit more this time, just a bit –

"Ma'am wants the paper?" the boy asked, twisting it deftly out of her line of sight. "Thruppence, ma'am, thruppence will do."

Emma dug in her purse and tossed him a sixpence, then scooped up the paper and began to walk and read at the same time, not the most advisable of occupations especially in streets crowded as London's, but too driven by curiosity to do anything else. The article was short and sensational. Thieves had struck at the heart of the prized Great Exhibition, and succeeded in purloining an item – a compass, it seemed – from one of the booths there. Considerable reward was promised for any patriotic citizen who turned in the scoundrel who dared to tarnish Britain's name and glory at such a moment, and who had been armed with two minor crudities of magic: a potent-darkness sphere, and some sort of elemental detonator. The article went on to remind its concerned Public that it was the opinion of the present Editor, and always had been, that such things were best left to those who knew what they were doing with it, and urged its readers to look most dimly on those who meddled in arcane matters beyond their understanding.

"Really," Emma murmured, noting that the Royal Society had never been mentioned in the entire piece – then again, they certainly would not want anyone knowing that a common thief armed with the simplest of small-time magic had been able to outwit, rob, and escape them. Gold had said that the thief was an associate of Hook's, though, and she felt her heart speed up as she studied the running figure. He'd have to have purchased the accessories for his heist at the Night Market – where else? And someone there might have seen him. Remembered him.

After a brief pause, Emma tore out the moving picture and folded it into her sleeve, leaving the rest of the newspaper on a bench; she imagined it wouldn't go to waste. Then, looking sharp for any policemen – or wolves – she stepped up to the nearest door, dug in her purse, and pulled out a plain black key. With some effort, she made it fit into the keyhole, turned it, and felt the familiar faint pulse travel up it and into her fingers. She pushed the door open, stepped through, and shut it behind her. Waited a moment or two, blinking as her eyes adjusted, then began to see lights, hear voices, and feel the ravishing mystery of the bazaar.

Nobody knew where, exactly, the Night Market was. It could only be found by those who had already been there before, and received a key from the Keeper. Once granted, any door it unlocked between the hours of dusk and dawn would open into the market, the caveat being that once you had left for the night, you could not return until the next one. This was a security precaution, avoiding spies and Government moles, as by the time they were able to come back, the market would have moved somewhere else. It was the bane of the Royal Society's existence, a loathing more than heartily returned, and Emma knew she would have to be very careful. If anyone in here found out that she was working a job for the Enemy, her key would be permanently confiscated, and she'd be lucky to get out with everything else intact as well.

The reasons for the two factions' hatred of each other were simple. The Royal Society were gentlemen magicians, wealthy and aristocratic, classically trained, educated as boys at Eton and Harrow, taken degrees in thaumaturgy or magical law or alchemy or aether science at Oxford and Cambridge, powerful lords and dukes who ran the British Empire from genteel parlors and government offices and tolerated no rivals. The Night Market was full of the untrained, the upstart, the unwashed: the commoner magicians. The hedge witches and wandering wizards, some with barely enough power to vanish a thimble, others able to speak to the dead, to conjure visions of past and future, to command dangerous occult forces. Tarot readers and pyromancers, druids with blue-painted faces, at least one poor fool in tin-pot armor claiming to be King Arthur reborn, weird sisters who spoke in threes and offered you the chance to take up the shears and cut your fate, cutpurses and charlatans – every sort there was, and more. Booths were crowded cock-a-hoop alongside each other, one selling ancient goldwork amulets from Samarkand and the next a chamber pot that leapt up and attempted to bite your unmentionables off (excellent gift for people you hated, the seller promised with a wink). All the food smelled delicious, although it was not necessarily advisable to eat it: it could turn you Brobdingnag-large or Lilliput-small or cause you to shriek like a teakettle for three days. You could buy love or beauty spells for your first kiss or the color of your hair. Ditchwater Sal had been rumored to be holding Una, lost princess of Stormhold, here as a slave for many years, until she was freed. Emma took that one, among all the Night Market's other fables, with considerable salt. Lost princess, heiress of a mythical kingdom, returned to a loving family that had missed her all along, that had never wanted to give her up – not so much.

If the Royal Society could only have found the place, they'd have shut it down and expelled the rabble, appropriated anything with actual power and destroyed the rest, but the Night Market had thus far evaded their clutches. Emma had worked diligently to earn her key, after being first brought here by one Graham Humbert – he had been her mentor, taught her the craft, taking her under his wing after she was released from prison, eighteen and convinced her life was over. Remembering Neal, she wanted nothing to do with him, but he was persistent. He was a seasoned bounty hunter, and she was his right-hand woman – for a little while, at least. Within a few months he was dead in her arms, she was alone again, and her walls were higher than ever.

She took a deep breath, clearing away the memories, as the sights and smells clustered familiarly around her. If she went from booth to booth, she'd be here all night and barely make a dent, and then she could get back tomorrow and find an entirely different crowd. But there was one way to expedite the process, assuming that he was both here and willing to cooperate – never a given in either case. Pushing aside a salesman dwarf trying to woo her with a selection of magical gemstones and charms, Emma slid the key back into her purse and plunged into the chaos.

Even in a place like this, Jefferson's stall was easy to spot. It was islanded all around with hats: every shape, every size, every color, from hardworking black bowlers to extravagant feathered confections with singing birds and jewels and a single drop of starlight. Some of them would make you discover a heretofore completely unsuspected talent for singing Italian opera, or permanently stick in place and refuse to let you wash your hair, or make you invisible on a dark night, or remember that bit of important information you had forgotten last Thursday. The master of this domain sat in the middle of them, frantically sewing more and mumbling to himself. But he kept an eye on almost everything that went on in the Market, and on the rare occasion you could get him to speak sense, he might (if paid in kind) tell you what or who he had seen.

Emma found it after only a few minutes, and paused outside, listening to the manic clack of shears from the shadows of the tent. "Jefferson," she ordered. "Come out. We need to talk."

A long pause, as she waited to find out whether the Hatter was sane today. Then the flap brushed aside, and Jefferson, hair tousled, brocade vest unbuttoned, and eyes belatedly uncrossing, emerged and blinked at her as if he had never seen her before. He processed. Then he grinned, which was not altogether a welcoming sight. "Ah, Emma. It's you. Tea?"

"No thank you." As a rule, one should never drink anything Jefferson offered. He wasn't _dangerous,_ per se, but he was far from safe, either, and they'd met due to him kidnapping her, drugging her, and ordering her to make him a particular magical hat. Kept talking about some other world he had to find his way back to. As a matter of fact, if Archie's asylum should be deservedly sicced on anyone, it was Jefferson, but he _was_ useful. Besides, Emma knew that if she brought an outsider into the Market to take away one of their own, it was treason.

"Shame. I was just. . . just having some." Jefferson lurched back around the corner, gesturing her to follow him. After a brief hesitation, Emma did so, stepping into the low, crowded space and moving a stack of hats off a stool to sit. Jefferson slouched with casual, arrogant grace on the far side of his worktable, sipping from a white porcelain cup with pinkie poshly extended. When she was just starting to wonder when he was planning to come up for air, he put it down, slopping Earl Grey over the side, and leaned forward. "So. What can I do?"

Emma extracted the newspaper clipping and unfolded it. "Who's this?"

Jefferson frowned, studying the small moving figure, fleeing the Exhibition over and over. "Where'd you get this?"

"From the _Times_." Emma shrugged. "He's in danger. I need to find him before someone else does." That wasn't a lie – if the Royal Society caught up to the thief first, flaying him alive would be downright merciful. "Have you seen him in the Market?"

Jefferson picked up the clipping and studied it, brows furrowing. "Maybe," he said at length. "Maybe not."

"Jefferson. This is important."

"Important," he repeated, with a low, dry husk of a laugh. "Don't you think I don't know that? Over and over. Day in, day out. Stitch stitch stitch. Next one will work, next one, next one, until it's not that one. But it's the next one after that, it has to be, _until it's not."_

She was losing him. "Jefferson! I will sew you another damn hat if you want. Just tell me if you've seen him, if you know him."

The Hatter sat back. "No."

" _No?_ Then I – "

He held up a hand. "But it could be, could be, I know who does."

"Who?"

"Comes at a price."

Exasperated, Emma opened her purse again, fished out a heavy golden guinea, and rolled it between her fingers, in hopes of focusing his mind. "There. Now. . .?"

"It's easy." Jefferson folded up the clipping and handed it back to her. "Just ask the Merry Men."


	3. Chapter 3

This high in the clouds, it was almost peaceful.

Not that it looked peaceful, not very. The thunderstorm had been raging since before he turned the hourglass, and was not likely to break before he turned it again. Streaks of icy rain slapped the deck, the darkness spectrally lit by a flash of lightning, the flames in the lanterns dancing a reel and the ropes keening like banshees. The _Roger_ rocked and groaned, as if disagreeing with her captain about the advisability of staying airborne during the tempest, wanting to land and go safely to earth, but he had outrun worse storms than this, and often without the sensitive silver aerials that were supposed to absorb a lightning strike (which would otherwise ignite the zeppelin and kill them all). This was nothing. Just him and his girl and the fury of the elements.

With the care of a craftsman, Killian Jones took the wheel two notches port, coasting them past a towering ten-story thunderhead that utterly dwarfed the flying vessel, frigid mist caressing his face beneath the goggles and muffler, his long leather jacket flapping madly. He always preferred to man the helm himself during these times; it gave him a delightful thrill of power and possibility, dicing with death on the blade of a knife, hearing the aerials crackle and hum, as they swept through the storm-washed skies high above the Channel. Wet, luminous light spilled over the deck as the moon emerged from behind the pillars of cloud, fat as a doubloon that he could pluck from its setting of stars. Storms always did this to him, drenched him clean, made him new. Made him feel halfway whole again, when he breathed.

He consulted the chart lashed to the running board, a glowing dot marking their approximate position – still open water below and another four hours to Paris, even with the _Roger's_ best speed. They should be there by dawn, though, and while the Prince-President, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, had long desired a formal alliance with Britain and would not miss the opportunity to secure it by handing over their most wanted criminal, Killian had always found the French customs officers and port wardens to be a more persuadable lot. Most of them were perfectly happy to shelter England's notorious and flamboyant enemy, though not so happy that they did it without regular fat bribes. Yet if the heat was ever too high in London, Paris was a reliable refuge, and he and the _Roger_ had flown this route many times. With the compass heavy in his pocket, they might never need to fly it again. They would, though. He wasn't one for settling. He'd thought he could have a home, once, but that was a very long time ago.

Killian's mouth tightened into a grim line. Keeping the helm braced in his hook, he used his hand to wipe the rain off his goggles, tempted to set the ship on her course and go below for a few hours of sleep. Once the storm cleared, she could mostly sail herself, and he had had precious little of it the last several days, being sure that that all was prepared. All he knew about his client was that he was supposedly a _şehzade,_ a son of some Ottoman sultan who lived in splendid exile in the Place Vendôme, and had promised a correspondingly stupendous sum for the compass, this small little thing. And thus far, it had been easy. Too easy, almost. But if the bugger wanted to pay and pay well, he'd have had the compass even if they had to climb a hundred beanstalks and fight a hundred giants for it.

The thunderheads were starting to break up. Far below, he could see the dark coast of France ribboning into view, the rolling patchwork fields of Normandy. He triangulated their position again: a few miles northeast of Dieppe. His bed was calling to him, and there'd be damn little time in it anyway. So, locking the wheel into position and activating the enchanted lodestone in the helm housing, he turned away and crossed the rain-slick deck to his cabin.

It was fairly capacious, airships being built to a larger and more luxurious standard than the others, with a bank of broad windows that looked out into the starry heavens, a claw-footed table and chairs, shelves built into the far wall and loaded with all sorts of books; he must be the only pirate in the world who accepted rare or valuable codices and manuscripts as payment as well as gold and jewels. On the other side was the bed, which still had the colorful quilts and embroidered cushions that Milah had chosen; before that it had been Liam's, spare and spartan, a grey blanket and flat white pillow. Sometimes he could sense them both there (usually when in a rum haze) if he lay very still, eyes closed. More often, it was just emptiness.

Killian shucked his damp jacket and vest and unclicked his hook from its brace, wincing as he began to undo the buckles that strapped the complicated leather apparatus to his shoulder. It had worn deep bloodless creases into his flesh, which stung painfully as circulation started to return. He had just started to lift it off over his head, an awkward business with one hand, when a sudden rap at the cabin door caught him by surprise.

Scowling, he let the contraption drop back into place, and still in shirt, trousers, and boots, strode crossly to answer it. "Mr. Smee, this is highly irregular! Back to quarters, or – "

"Apologies, Captain." His first mate did indeed look apologetic, but also clearly had not ventured to interrupt him in the dead of night for a lark. "But Scarlet was talking, down below decks, and it seems as if, in the course of obtaining our. . . portable assets, he may have gotten himself clawed up by one of the Police wolves. Or bit. He wasn't sure which."

 _Bloody hell._ "And the bastard didn't bother to tell _me_ this?"

"Said you seemed a trifle more concerned about the compass, Cap'n."

 _Bloody hell,_ Killian thought again, it being an applicable epithet in every situation when it came to Will Scarlet. There was no arguing with Scarlet's skills as a thief, which he made liberal and profitable use of, and he could damn well recognize a man with the same emptiness behind his eyes where love and family used to be. Could also sympathize with a man on the run from the British authorities, and had to confess to enjoying their banter and bickering, while being careful not to let him get away with too much. Will had been sailing with the _Roger_ for almost a year now, and the men all liked him, but Killian often wondered if it was past time to boot him off. No matter how diligently he trod on it, there was a small but genuine part of him that did care for the bugger, and that meant Will was destined either to die horribly or turn traitor and betray him for thirty pieces of silver (though it would likely be more, knowing the bounty on his head). Will was a bloody nuisance, tell it true, but Killian had sometimes entertained the idea that they could be each other's family in the way he had lacked for so long, had offered to another young man once before and had thrown back in his face. Will couldn't replace Bae and he couldn't replace Liam, but he could be something. A brother. A friend.

And that, being the case, had to be destroyed before the world could get around to it first. Which it now seemed, by virtue of the Police wolves, it might be. If Will had been bitten, then, if left untreated, he would become a full-fledged werewolf at the next full moon – three days from now. Lycanthropy treatments were finicky and expensive, but they _were_ available – in London, that was. While Paris had _l'Academie des arts magiques_ , the equivalent institution to the Royal Society, French magicians were kept on a much more stringent leash. They were only allowed to research and study the history of magic, not perform it openly, and certainly not to function as a shadow government like their English counterparts. As well, to placate the Catholic establishment, Louis-Napoléon had promised that the Pope's encyclicals and bulls would be respected, and as Pius had made his opinions on magic flatly known, any unlicensed practitioner was taking his own life in his hands. The shadow of the guillotine on the Place de la Concorde was not an idle threat.

"Thank you, Mr. Smee," Killian said tersely, seeing his first mate still bobbing at the door. He slammed it, then leaned against it, swearing under his breath. Of course. Of _course._

The choice was quite simple. Either he could turn the ship around, fly back to London, and cure Will of his furry little problem – at the cost of missing the meeting and mortally offending the powerful man who had arranged it in the first place. Or press on, make the rendezvous in Paris to sell the compass, and risk condemning Will to the same nasty, brutish, and short life as the rest of the poor bastards now swept up in the Royal Society's ever-broadening net. He couldn't keep a wolf aboard the ship, especially a new one with no clue what he had become or how to control it, and dumping Will anywhere in Britain would get him killed outright by some foe or other, wolf or human. The climate in the rest of Europe was even less hospitable.

In other words, Killian would be left with no choice but to put Will in Robert Gold's power. To let that bastard whoreson take one more thing from him. And that, so long as he had breath in his body, could live one more day and one more night thinking about getting revenge on the crocodile, skinning him, ripping him from limb from limb, was never going to bloody happen.

He calculated swiftly in his head. It need not be a complete calamity. If he turned around and returned to London right now, got Will pawned off on some hopefully discreet doctor who had never seen a newspaper (or at least could be paid to pretend he hadn't) then ditched his extra cargo and flew back like all the demons of hell were on his tail, he could make it to Paris only slightly late. If he apologized profusely and threw in some extra treasure (not that an Ottoman prince, if that was indeed who his client was, would have need of it) then it could likely still be salvaged. If not, well. . . if worse came to absolute worst, he'd sell the compass back to the Royal Society at three times its value, but he preferred to avoid that option.

Decision made, Killian threw back on his hook, vest, jacket, scarf, and goggles, exhausted muscles complaining as he emerged at a trot from the cabin and headed topside to the wheel again. Took hold and swung her sharply around, banking through the clouds, ropes straining and the great silk phantom of the zeppelin swaying and jolting, a feeling of momentary weightlessness until they caught the new direction. Wearily recalibrated the charts for London, fired up every spare thruster, and stared down the barrel of the horizon as they sailed back into the rain clouds. Back into the storm.

It was a bloody good thing his hatches were battened like all hell.

They wouldn't make it there before dawn. That ruled out the Night Market, as they did not have time to loiter around all day waiting for it to open again. Then there was the problem of landing the airship in the middle of London, agreement with the Dock masters or not, whilst a full-scale manhunt was on for whoever had robbed the Exhibition – a theft they had doubtless traced to him. But landing on the outskirts and rowing in would take more time, though Killian figured he could always just put Will over the side in the _Roger's_ longboat and order him to fend for himself. Should do that anyway, bloody hell. Throw him into the ocean.

Yet either way, there remained the problem of getting him off the ship. According to the pirates' code, no man on the crew was ever forced to serve, in sharp contrast to the brutal press gangs of the Crown that many of them had escaped – Killian had read enough accounts, of Henry Avery and Edward Teach and Black Bartholomew Roberts, to know that leaving the Navy for a pirate's life was a fairly common career move. Most of the sailors were in the Navy to start with because they'd been pressed, beaten and kidnapped into service. But Liam Jones, in defiance of the standing orders that required Royal Navy captains to be as brutal as possible, had treated his men with firm but fair respect, a piece of common human decency that could have lost him his command if a superior had come on board and considered his crew insufficiently terrorized. When he'd stolen the ship after his brother's death and gone rogue, Killian had been determined to honor both that and the pirate tradition of keeping no slaves and giving every man a say in shipboard business. Though he _was_ the captain and a damned good one too, if he tried to throw Will off the ship with no apparent provocation, it was going to cost him dear. Pirates became pirates because they hated corrupt kings, tyrannical captains, and the life of a slave. They didn't take to going back.

Still. It wasn't just the sale of the compass that he was risking, not merely a matter of money. After all, money was scarcely an issue for a pirate. But this connoisseur of obscure navigational objects had said that he needed someone who hated Robert Gold as much as he did, and whose successful service in this matter might lead to him finding out certain valuable information. Killian must be out of his mind to risk missing it.

So, then. He knew what he had to do: leave Will behind, and find a way to make it look like an accident. Didn't have to kill him, just get rid of him. Once he wasn't a werewolf, Will could disappear back into the underworld, make a fine life there. They'd protect him from the Royal Society, they'd hail him as a hero. And if not, it wasn't Killian's bloody problem.

Not his bloody problem.

* * *

 Will Scarlet had expected to wake up with Paris unfurling beneath him, the Gothic bell-towers of the churches and the grey ribbon of the Seine, all the romance and elegance and mystery of the land of French girls, fancy pastries, and blokes who ate frogs, and hence was significantly befuddled as to why the bloody hell he appeared to be looking at the arse-end of Wapping (Wapping-on-the-Ooze, it was generally known as) instead. They were flying right over Execution Dock, in fact, where pirates were hanged, then their corpses staked out for three turns of the tide, and Will couldn't help but seein' that as, you asked him, something of a bad omen. Not to mention that he couldn't for the life of him figure out what he was doing back in London anyway, and momentarily considered the possibility that he had been captured while asleep and dragged onto a Navy ship to face the day of judgment. Aye, he could just hear himself informing a hostile Admiralty court that he had slept through his own arrest, and would they maybe consider having mercy on him for it?

After he blinked hard, however, he recognized that he was still in his bunk on the _Roger,_ jerked out of a turbulent, unsatisfying dream to the sharp pain in his shoulder. It seemed to be getting worse. He had doctored himself up with the surgeon's stuff, but his memory had gone a bit hazy after that. Had availed himself of his rum ration as a practical solution, and then the lads had wanted the blow-by-blow, so he gave them the rip-roaring account of his adventures, making it all very grandiose and exciting. Must have wandered off to goo-goo land somewhere in the middle of that, thus to arrive at his current state of confusion. No, but what the _buggeration_ was happening? It beggared belief that the Captain had decided to call the whole thing off and go home. Perhaps they'd been boarded by agents of the Crown and forced to fly back under duress? Forgot to take the kettle off before they left the first time?

In any event, no matter what it was, Will would feel better facing it with his trousers on. He rolled out of his bunk, hauled his clothing back into place, picked up the rum bottle and tipped it hopefully over his mouth, but nothing was left. Considering the muffled pounding in his head, maybe that was for the best, but at least the upside of having your shoulder used as a raw steak for a wolf was that it tended to distract you from minor ailments. He was going to be useless if he had to swing anything at anybody, so he hoped that wasn't on the docket. That and –

The _Roger_ was still descending, rain scattering against the portholes like beads of flung mercury. Will grabbed the storm lines strung up along the walls and braced himself as they rumbled in for a landing, kicking up a long skim of white-frothed river. They bounced and swayed back and forth, he shook his head and regretted it, and had just started to attempt to get his bearings when there was a foreboding knock on the door, followed by the ingress of Mr. Smee and several of the larger-sized crewmen. "Scarlet. You'll be coming with us."

"What's this?" Will demanded, taking a step backwards. "The bloody hell did I do? I'm not so pissed that I can't – "

"Orders." Smee looked suspiciously pleased with himself. "We're to take you on the boat and make sure you don't turn into a wolf. Then leave you behind and run." He frowned. "Wait. Forget I said that."

Will stared at him, jaw sagging. Then suddenly, the pieces clicked. "You! You ratted me out, didn't you?" His recollections of last night were murky at best, but surely he'd mentioned the wolves, wanting to sound like a bloody hero, and Smee had scuttled off and filched on him to the Captain. Which meant he himself, Will Scarlet, was the reason they'd upped and sailed back to London, which meant. . .

Damn. He hadn't even thought of that possible aspect of the situation. Trying to disguise how taken off guard he had been, he narrowed his eyes at the first mate instead. "Well then, you bloody well better hope I don't turn, because the first thing I'd do is bite you in the arse, you blithering sneak. If you or anyone think they're gettin' me off the ship, they'd better – "

"Scarlet." The voice came from behind them, and they all did stupid little twirls to see the Captain leaning in the doorway. "I heard you encountered a slight mishap while so generously procuring the compass for us, so it seemed the least I could do to make sure you didn't spend your days running from the bloody Royal Society and your nights howling at the moon. So come on, we're going to find you a doctor."

"Ah," Will said, somewhat mollified. He aimed another glare at the hoodlum gang, then proceeded past them with great dignity and followed the Captain on deck to the launch boat, swinging on its divots above the choppy Thames. "I hope I'm not expected to manage that thing by myself," he remarked, eyeing it skeptically. "Can barely row with 'alf me arm danglin' by a thread, can I? Wouldn't be humane to send me by myself into London as a charity case, me being a wanted fugitive and such."

"Smee will go with you."

"Like hell Smee will go with me."

The Captain glared at him. "He will if I bloody well – what's that?"

Will squinted, seeing nothing – and then an instant later, the scorching bloom of fire in the fog, and heard a distant report of guns. Something shrieked past perilously close to their starboard quarter, and the water bubbled and hissed where it struck, sending up a billowing column of steam. It fought with Will's fuddled brain an instant longer, then came clear. An ambush. They had landed in the middle of an ambush. An ambush in the middle of the Thames, merchant ships to every side, were they bloody insane? Clearly, the depths of pissed right off the Royal Society currently was had never before been known to man. But how on _earth_ had they –

" _GO!"_ Hook shoved him hard in the back, toppling Will arse over teakettle into the boat. The crew was boiling topside, sprinting to load the guns and return fire – only to be stopped by a bellow ordering them that they had better not even think about it. An answering shot would be as good as a dead reckoning to announce their position, as well as making it plain that they had something to hide. Instead the Captain hauled on the wheel, jerking the thrusters back to life, as they skimmed along the river and took off again, another shot scoring the keel. A plume of green sparks crackled through the rigging like St. Elmo's fire, and Will thought of the vulnerable zeppelin above them. One shell through that thing, and they were all history.

The very next second, he thought they were, in fact, done for. There was a whistling shriek somewhere in the clouds, whether magical or mechanical he had no idea, and an explosion lit up the aft deck. Shards of wood sprayed everywhere, silhouetting spread-eagled bodies against the glare, and the _Roger_ juddered and lurched horrifyingly, slewing almost dead in the air. Will had been protected from the main force of the blast by the boat falling on him (wasn't too fussed about it, considering) but clawed out from underneath it and crawled across the tilting deck, heart in his throat. "Bloody hell. . . bloody hell. . . bloody hell. . . OY! JONES!"

He thought he saw an indistinct dark shape struggling to sit up, and made it to the ruins of the helm just in time to see the Captain, blood running down his face from a gash in his forehead, swearing and spitting. Upon laying eyes on Will, his expression altered to an even more wrathful aspect. "What in damnation are _you_ still doing here? I told you to get on the bloody boat!"

"And sail down the Royal Navy's gullet in a bathtub all by my sodding self so they could shoot me and let you escape? I don't bloody think so!"

The Captain spluttered some idiotic protest, which Will ignored. "Give me that." Yanking the spyglass from Hook's belt, he twisted it open and peered into the fog, searching for the shapes behind the next muzzle-flash. It was Nelson's chequey to be sure – Royal Navy airships, two of them at least, closing fast, and the _Roger_ disabled, able to do nothing but wait to be taken prisoner. They wouldn't be kept in suspense for long; it would be surprising if they even got a trial. Curtains for them all and fare thee well, straight and down the pit of –

Wait. He'd just thought of something. The lodestone and chart were blown, the wheel useless, but the old girl still had a few surprises up her sleeve. Will reached into the splintered ruins of the housing, fumbled around, and triggered the cloaking device.

It was an old and balky one, purchased at exorbitant cost from a French frigate being dismantled for scrap, but said frigate had been one of the few on her side to survive Trafalgar, and there must have been a reason for that. There was a quick, powerful pulse as the invisibility magic flared through the torn lines and tilting deck, enshrouding the _Roger_ completely just as the two Navy gunboats burst through the clouds. They swept by on either side of the pirate ship nearly close enough to shine the brass off its outriggers – although invisible, they were no less solid – and hurtled into the fog bank ahead without a second glance or slowing.

Will blew out a slow, ragged breath, sitting back on his heels. "Well. That was worth every penny what you paid that villain for it, eh?"

For a long moment, Killian Jones appeared stunned. Then he pushed himself upright and fixed Will with a baleful stare. "Get your hands off my ship."

"What the – ? I just _saved_ the damned thing and everyone on it! A little bloody gratitude might not stick in your craw!"

"Saved it only because you were stupid enough to get yourself attacked by a werewolf and ruin the meeting I've been trying years to make!" The captain got unsteadily to his feet, balancing himself with a grimace. "I thought I'd do you a favor – which you don't deserve, by the by – get back and drop you off to be seen to. Now thanks to you, the ship isn't going anywhere!"

" _What?"_ The unfairness of this made Will choke. "I wasn't the one who turned it around, eh? Maybe if you'd admit there are other things in life worth more than your bloody revenge, you'd have thought differently! But you can't even see 'em when they're right – "

And then, despite his head of righteous steam, he faltered. The look on the Captain's face, the utter hellfire in his eyes, took even Will Scarlet, who was used to speaking his mind more than was customary, back a step or three. "No," Hook said, flat and cold as stone. "There's nothing worth more to me than my revenge. And you just damned well got in the way."

Despite this, there was still the fact that the cloaking device would not last forever, and that they couldn't fly anywhere until a new lodestone was installed and the helm repaired. Which meant that Killian had to take his chances on sneaking into London to buy one, while fulfilling the original purpose of their ill-fated return: stop Will from turning into a werewolf. But as it was still only midmorning, the Night Market would not be an option for hours. Nor was he inclined to wait.

"Does anyone have a useful idea for alternatives?" he snapped. "Every bloody physician in the city who deals with magical maladies must be in the Royal Society's pocket, go to any of them and they'll turn us in. Elsewise – "

"There's one," one of the younger crewmen piped up. "A doctor, that is. When I was a lad, me mum started going a bit barmy, talkin' to things as wasn't there and turnin' the rest to God knows what. We weren't able to pay for the doctor, but he saw her anyway. He said it was because she was born magic and wasn't allowed to do nuffin' wiv it, so it had been re – repressed all her life and was burstin' out all over. He did the best he could for her and didn't never tell the Royal Society, not a word. Even though it's illegal not to report folk as has it."

"Really." Killian cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. "What happened to her?"

"She. . . she died, cap'n. Three month later, of the bloody flux. That's why I ran away to sea. But it wasn't nuffin' to do with magic, she got that 'andled and was right as rain. Cross me 'eart."

"Really," Killian murmured again. "And what was this paragon of medical virtue's _name?"_

"Er. . ." The young man thought hard, then brightened. "Opper! That was it, sure. Archibald 'Opper, in 'Arley Street."

"Think he means Archibald Hopper in Harley Street, Cap'n," Smee put in helpfully.

"Thank you for that clarification, Mr. Smee, I should have never deduced it on my own. Very well. If you're right about this, there will be a tidy sum. If, on the other hand, you get us handed over to the Royal Society and hanged, rest assured the same will become of you."

With this arrangement settled, the disabled ship was brought as low as they could get it without landing, and the longboat was launched. And that was how Killian Jones and Will Scarlet found themselves rowing up a filthy stone tunnel, one of the many secret waterways under London, ignoring each other as hard as possible. Both of them had donned dark hoods and cloaks, and beneath those a small arsenal of pistols strapped to bandoliers, but neither was in the least happy, and was making sure the other knew it. Killian, for his part, had just about decided that even if Dr. Hopper's discretion extended to not handing a poor, harmless old woman over to the authorities, it would not do likewise in re: the most wanted pirate in Britain and his accomplice who had embarrassed the nation by stealing from the Great Exhibition. He abruptly shipped the oars and stopped dead, green-black water lapping at the sides.

Will eyed him darkly. "What? Expectin' the damn thing to row itself?"

"No. I was thinking we should bloody well wait for the Night Market. You've already ruined the Paris meeting, so there's no sense in marching in and getting ourselves arrested to boot."

Will was clearly thinking about firing back, but chewed his tongue instead. Finally he said, "Gold strikes me as the sort of bloke who's made enemies everywhere. Surely there's other ways you can get after him, if that's what you really want, even if this one goes belly-up."

Killian had been fully girded for another insult, and was unsure how to respond to what looked like, if you stood several paces away and squinted hard, almost like encouragement. He snorted instead and threw out the hawser, tying the boat to the makeshift underground pier and clambering out. "Either way, I'm not sitting here for the rest of the day. Suit yourself."

After a moment, he heard the thief step out after him, and set his jaw. So, then. He'd have to do it the hard way.

Killian and Will spent the daylight hours deep under London, hungry and in pain and out of sorts, until at last Will climbed near enough the surface to get a look and judge that it was almost dusk. "And about time too," he added, dropping back down. "Let's get the blazes out of here."

Killian grunted a terse agreement as Will pulled the black key from his jacket, walked to a grimy, rusted door in the tunnel wall, and jammed it in, twisting. Both of them waited in terse expectation. Will gave it another jolt with his good shoulder, wiggling the key hopefully, but the door continued to remain silent and shut. It did not open into the Night Market. It did nothing.

"Bloody hell," Will said incredulously. "The damn place's locked me out!"

"Get out of the way," Killian ordered, shoving him away from the door and removing his own key from his vest. He, however, had no more success, and as he stared at it, a horrible realization began to dawn. It was certainly not unheard of for the Market to banish troublemakers from its premises, and as Will must have every constable in London after him, as well as the Royal Navy clearly having been tipped off somehow and lying in wait to destroy the _Roger_ on its return, that would be more than enough for it to conclude that they were an intolerable risk. And if so, their lifeline was cut. They couldn't survive in the underworld without the Night Market. They couldn't even survive tonight.

Killian shook the key and swore at it, as if this would suddenly render it more amenable to his bidding. "This door's the problem," he declared. "Probably rusted shut. Let's find another."

When it was full dark overhead, they scaled the ladder and tumbled out in a narrow, reeking sty of a back alley, somewhere in one of London's most decrepit districts. They found another door and tried it instead, but this time the key didn't even fit, and started to glow an ominous red, burning hot enough to sear, as Killian hissed and dropped it. The message could not have been clearer. They were patently not welcome, and if they continued to try to force their way in, the Market would have to take drastic measures to keep them out.

"Well, that answers that," Killian muttered, pressing his blistered hand into the cool mud. In default of the Night Market, the only way to get a new lodestone for the _Roger_ would be to steal one from another ship, and the only way to prevent Will from becoming the most unwelcome guest on a sheep farm was –

Oh, bloody hell.

* * *

 Archibald Hopper was just emerging from underground, thinking longingly of the supper club a short stroll away on Queen Anne Street, which served a delicious hot fish stew to stick to the ribs and hit the spot on this miserable wet night, when it occurred to him that there was a draft circulating through his front hall, carrying a tide of floating papers. Frowning, he shut the bookcase firmly and rolled down the silver grate – he trusted Ruby, of course, but everyone needed a little help sometimes – then hurried out to find that his front door had been somehow left ajar. His secretary must have forgotten to lock up, though such carelessness wasn't like her. He kept no money or valuables in the office, though sometimes young addicts would try to break in and steal his supplies of opium, laudanum, and other such substances. Those he kept in the safe, but it was still dark and quiet, and desperate junkies weren't known for stealth. Odd.

Nonetheless, Archie straightened his bowtie, preparing to go and reason with them. As long as they hadn't taken anything else, he saw no reason to involve the Metropolitan. These were just poor mad people, who didn't deserve what would be coming to them otherwise. The police had enough on their plate, what with the scandal at the Exhibition. He just had to –

Archie took one step, and walked directly into the barrel of a gun.

"Good evening, Dr. Hopper." It was a low, commanding voice, with an accent that had once been a gentleman's but slid and roughened into the darker cadences of the street. "Terribly sorry to engage your services like this, but we are all slaves to fortune. Now you're going to make an important decision, which I shall give you thirty seconds to ponder on. When I remove this pistol from its present location between your eyeballs, you can assist us, or you can not."

Archie was too stunned to be frightened, but quickly pulled himself together; it wasn't the first time he'd been threatened by a patient or a burglar. "You can have the drugs," he said, as firmly as he could. "If you want them. The opium, the – "

"Oh, we haven't come for that."

Archie was confused. "You haven't?"

"No. We have heard you know something about treating magical maladies, and hence, you're going to give us a cure for someone bitten by a werewolf. Quickly."

"What the – for _R – ?"_ He bit back his patient's name; she had been born a wolf, there was no way to undo that. "I mean, for. . . _you?"_

"No," a second voice said, also male, sounding resigned. "For me. Evenin', guv'nor. Sorry about the gun. He's a bit of a melodramatic chap."

Archie's eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and by blinking them still harder, he could make out the shapes of the two intruders. The one holding him up was taller by several inches, though both of them were swathed in black cloaks that made them look like bats or vicars. They also reeked as if they'd spent the last several days in the sewers, and were dripping rainwater on his hallway carpet. Their faces – he _should_ recognize the first one, he had an intense feeling that he should, it was nagging in the back of his brain somewhere, but the second –

"You!" he blurted out. "You're the one that stole the compass from the Great Exhibition! The one they're all looking for!"

The second man sighed. "Well spotted. Jig's up. S'pose we've got no choice now. Go ahead and shoot him."

"I. . . wait," Archie stammered, as the first one cocked the hammer of the gun with an ominous thunk. "It happens I _do_ know a thing or two about lycanthropy treatments. It's rather painful, mind, and expensive. I – I don't work for free – "

"You've got a gun to your head," the first one pointed out, with his cool, cocksure air of command. "Of course you bloody work for free."

Hard as he tried, Archie could not find a way to disagree with that logic, and allowed himself to be marched into his workroom by the two intruders. His eyes flicked to the bell he was supposed to pull in case of emergencies, which would alert the Marylebone fire brigade, but he didn't doubt they'd already taken the liberty of cutting it. He lit an oil lamp to see by, casting weird, wavering shadows over the room, and adopted a friendly tone, hoping to put them off their guard. "It's a bit of a process," he said. "Sure I can't offer you fellows supper and a drink?"

The one with the gun pointed it at him in answer. "Get moving, you scrofulous cephalopod, before I blow your brains out."

" _Scrofulous cephalopod?"_ his sidekick echoed with a snort. "What the bugger does that even _mean?"_

"Ah – an octopus with scurvy. More or less."

"An octopus with scurvy. Of course. Bloody hell, Jones."

Archie jerked. Feeling their eyes flash instantly to him, knowing he'd overheard _that_ slip of the tongue, he did his best to keep his expression blank and incurious. It happened he _had_ been by the Admiralty, yesterday afternoon, on Emma's errand. Done his best to sell the cover story of her being the wife of a Jones who had served on the _Jewel of the Realm_ prior to its treasonous defection, but hadn't come away with much for his pains. Contrary to Emma's expectations, the Whitehall bureaucrats very much did care about that ship, and one of them told Archie he'd better find out who, exactly, his patient was – it being known that the _Jewel_ was now an infamous pirate vessel, the _Jolly Roger,_ and its captain one of the worst criminals in the Empire. If she _was_ married to said Jones, they wanted to talk to her.

After that, Archie had made all sorts of excuses, claiming it was only a misunderstanding and that his patient was a law-abiding woman who had never so much as had a disloyal thought. He'd laid it on thick, he supposed, but he couldn't help but fear that he had accidentally blown Emma's cover, even though he'd never mentioned her name. Whoever she was working for was hopefully powerful enough to give her additional protection, though he had to wonder what they were playing at by sending her on the trail of – of _this_ maniac. Was that who he was? It must be.

Affecting nonchalance, Archie unlocked his store cupboard and got to work. His practice focused more on emotions and the talking cure and support rather than the powerful and dangerous stuff of the apothecaries and chemists, but as Ruby wasn't the first of her kind to pass through here, he had acquired a basic competence at wolfbite potion. The Royal Society would know if a doctor was buying consistent large quantities of it somewhere, and then they would start asking questions, which Archie preferred to avoid. There was no magic involved, just a few specialty ingredients, and the rest was science. He'd learned it from a man called Whale, one of the other doctors on Harley Street, though sometimes he wasn't sure if _doctor_ was the best word for him. It was well known that he paid university students to snatch fresh corpses from churchyards, and heaven only knew what he did with them after that. Archie had always thought it was best for his own health not to enquire too closely. Whale might be making more monsters than he was mending.

At last, Archie stepped back from the bubbling crucible, watching the iridescent blue smoke coil into the air. "Well," he said, doing his best to sound pleasant. "A few hours for that, then it'll be done. You look tired. Surely you'd like to – "

Jones moved closer and jammed the pistol beneath Archie's chin, their faces barely an inch apart. With the other hand – no, it wasn't a hand, it was a metal _hook,_ and if the doctor was in doubt about his captor's identity, he was no longer – he rested the lethally sharp tip on his forehead. "Go ahead," he said silkily. "Give it a try. I've always wanted to dissect a cricket."

"Sir," Archie said. "I can see that you are a very troubled man, a very lonely man, and you've made many choices and faced many terrible things to become who you are now, which I'm sure I can't understand or imagine. But there's always a chance to change. To – "

"Shut your mouth, insect." The ugly light gleamed darker in the pirate's blue eyes. "Before I bloody squash you."

The second man cleared his throat. "Oy. Some of us might think it was bad form to be threatenin' the doctor currently saving our arses."

" _Your_ arse. I assure you my own does not enter into it at any point."

"Sure it doesn't. But you've made your point, the stuff's brewin', you don't have to keep gettin' up in his face like that. Chap might get a trifle confused about what you want from 'im."

Jones snorted, but consented to remove both hook and pistol, though his hunter's gaze never wavered. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I've another errand to see to, while we wait. You – " glancing at his sidekick – "do the honors, would you?"

The second man sighed deeply, rolled his eyes at the ceiling, then reached beneath his cloak, produced a pistol of his own, and cocked it. "Sorry, guv'nor," he said resignedly. "Orders."

The hostage thus assured, Jones made his exit on whatever nefarious purpose he was about, and Archie, sensing that his second captor was of a more accommodating temperament, turned an appealing smile on him. "What's your name, son?"

"Will," the young man said, readily enough. "Got meself bit by a wolf like an idiot. 'Preciate your help in ensuring it ain't permanent."

"Not a problem at all. Where – ah – how long do you think your. . . friend will be gone?"

"No idea. How quick you think he can make it to the docks and back?"

"I have no idea," Archie said ridiculously, wondering if the lad was actually attempting to make conversation. "Is he – stealing a ship, then?"

"Stealing a bit of one." Will shrugged. "Mind if we sit? My legs are bloody killing me." With that, not waiting actual permission, he flopped filthy cloak and all onto Archie's brocade-upholstered davenport. "Don't worry, guv'nor, we're not going to actually off you. The captain's more bark than bite. Sometimes. I think."

Archie considered, then sat down next to him. "Aren't you afraid I'll turn you in?"

"Generally assume everyone's going to turn me in, then work backwards from there." Will scratched his chin. "And in fact, we 'eard of you due to someone sayin' you wouldn't fink on us, actually. So there's that."

Despite himself, the doctor was intrigued. "Who said that?"

"Some boy whose mum you sorted, apparently. Poor woman who had to bottle her magic up her whole life and it turned her potty. Said you 'elped her with that and never said a word to. . ." Will paused. "Them."

"I. . . I did." Archie was surprised, and pleased. What with him having sent up red flags at the Admiralty already, he would not be surprised if a pair of Police Inspectors were round here to snoop in the morning. It was to his own advantage to keep his mouth shut, as much as that of the intruders. He might not mind seeing Jones suffer a bit, but Will seemed like a nice enough lad (if rather in need of firm guidance) and the Royal Society was no friend of Archie's either.

The two of them whiled the time away, saying nothing. Archie asked to get up and use the commode at one point, which was granted. Thinking mournfully of his lost supper, he checked on the cure, stirred in a few more ingredients, then returned to sit on the davenport again, almost at his ease despite the fact that the young thief was still holding a gun on him. "You can put that away, can't you, Will?" he offered. "I'm no threat to you."

Will hesitated. "Orders."

"Of course. Didn't mean to incite you to disloyalty to your captain." Archie smiled generously. "Bit of a moody sort, isn't he?"

"That's one way to put it. Him and his bloody revenge."

Ah. Something here. Something that might be a clue for Emma, and whoever had sent her after the pirate. "Revenge?" Archie asked delicately. "On who?"

"Gold." Will shrugged. "Robert Gold. Hates the bastard's guts."

"Is there anyone in London who doesn't?"

Will looked surprised, then laughed. "Doubt many of them are so open about it, though, considering what happens to his enemies. Bit of a personal affair between Gold and our dear captain. Gold's wife, you know, she – " Suddenly catching himself, he stopped.

"Yes?" Archie pressed, fascinated. He'd heard rumors about Milah Gold, the President's late wife – all tidied over and hushed up, but it had been the scandal of the century when she left him for someone else. Embarrassed him, diminished him, made him into a laughingstock. His enemies had jeered that Robert Gold might be the most powerful man in Britain, but he could not even govern his own wife. _Poor woman. She never stood a chance._ Sinister gossip held that Gold, when he finally tracked her down, had killed her himself. This was after the magician's only son, Baelfire, his pride and joy, had run away from home as well. _Enough skeletons in that family's closet to fill a graveyard._

"Never mind." Will shook his head. "He'd skelp me if he heard me sittin' here and babblin' on like this." He checked the grandfather clock. "Should be back soon, assuming he didn't get into any more bloody trouble. Though stealin' a lodestone isn't the easiest thing in the world."

Archie filed that bit of intelligence away as well – the pirate's ship must have been damaged in a previous engagement, and hence was here in London somewhere, incapacitated and unable to get away without replacement parts. At least he would have plenty to tell Emma, whenever she paid a return visit. She could then catch Jones, and all their lives would be saved.

The potion was almost done by now, bubbling and hissing, and Archie got up, took it off the heat, and poured the thick, silvery substance into a cup. "Drink it slowly," he advised, handing it to Will, who sniffed it dubiously. "Gentle sips."

Will shrugged. "Not much of a sippin' man," he commented, and threw it down at a gulp.

At once, his eyes bulged out, his face turned an entire series of remarkable colors, and he wheezed and heaved and hacked, gulping air and pressing a fist into his stomach. "Bloody – _hell,"_ he managed, grimacing. "What'd you put in there, bloody – "

"I did tell you to sip it," Archie informed him. "It's not my fault you didn't listen, now is it?"

Will didn't answer, being occupied in attempting not to retch his guts out, but belatedly got hold of himself. "Right," he said hoarsely. "Cap'n can get back any time he likes."

Archie heartily agreed. It wasn't long off from dawn, and no matter how careful the pirate doubtless was, the last thing he wanted was for someone to see Captain Hook sneaking into his respectable practice. He had been awake all night, and felt rather pleasantly light-headed as the distant church bells called four, then eventually five. Will was drowsing as well, no matter how hard he was trying otherwise, and the gun had long since made its disappearance. The further the dawn broke, however, the more apparent it became to Archie, even if he didn't want to say it.

"Will," he said, when the bells began to strike six. "Will, I don't think he's coming."

"Bollocks," Will muttered sleepily. "Unless he got caught, and he don't get caught."

"Nonetheless." Archie stood up. "He's gone. He left you here."

Will looked confused more than anything, clearly not thinking that a man who stabbed others in the back for a living would do the same to him – which Archie thought rather naïve, considering. He shook his head, his first instinct clearly to deny it, but something suddenly occurred to him. He swore out loud and jerked to his feet, as the reality of his predicament hit.

"That bloody pirate son of a whore and a pig," the thief said angrily. "You're right. He damned well did."


	4. Chapter 4

Killian had not been at all sure it would work. Navigational lodestones tended to take on personalities of their own, remembering the ships they had served in and the places they had gone, growing attached to their captains and charts, and ripping one out and expecting it to serve the same function in an unfamiliar vessel was not the wisest of wagers. Not that he had any choice. After he pried the lodestone out of the merchant airship (tempting as it was, he didn't want to steal one from the Navy; they undoubtedly had a way to track it) and run like bugger and got back to the _Roger,_ told the crew that Scarlet had fallen behind and hence was subject to what happened to pirates who fell behind, everything still hung on whether they could get the damn thing to work. He knelt, pulled out the broken pieces of the blown-out one, jiggered the new one into place, and held his breath.

It sputtered on and off, then started to go dark. He growled and hit the helm housing with a closed fist, and the lodestone lurched back to life, flaring through the ship. Hauling ponderously out of her near-capsize, the _Roger_ quickly began to gain altitude as Killian drove them hard skyward. He hadn't been able to steal a replacement for the chart, so they'd have to fly blind to Paris, but he'd managed the route so many times, in so many conditions, that he did not suppose it to be much of a problem. He refused to believe that the opportunity was gone altogether.

He was completely clear in his mind about what he had done. He could tell that the doctor wasn't going to turn them in (not one of them, at least) and with the cure well on the way, that meant Will also wasn't going to end up as a werewolf. Hence, Killian had done a bloody sight more for him than he had to, and the thief had no further chances to get in the way of his revenge. He couldn't go to the authorities to tell them about the pirates without also incriminating himself, so Killian had no fear of the bugger attempting to pay him back in kind. Whatever Scarlet did with his life now was of no concern to him.

It was a tense and harrowing ascent, the lodestone nearly going out several more times, and the cloaking device flickering under the strain of the damaged timbers. But they made it, and Killian allowed a triumphant smile to cross his face. As scrapes went, he had wiggled out of that one with barely a scratch. It was almost a pity no one would ever know.

They flew throughout the day, overcoming Killian's natural aversion to doing so in the interests of speed, taking a careful, roundabout route. There was a dicey moment as they were trying to skirt the Navy hotbed of Dover, but they managed to outrun it, launch over the Channel in the still-thick fog, and cut into France as close as they could, missing Flemish territory by a hair. By then they were safe, and Killian, reeling from lack of sleep and starting to see things that weren't there, was dispatched below to his cabin, his men being insistent that they could handle the rest.

He went under far and fast, and was quite confused on his waking, as they were (at last, thank God) descending through a wet, smoky Parisian dusk, pinpricks of light guiding them toward the coil of the Seine and the Quai des Tuileries, their usual mooring spot. Bracketed by the Pont Royal upstream and the Pont de la Concorde downstream, overlooked by the Musée and Palais du Louvre, it was also a short walk to Place Vendôme, the home of their mysterious buyer. It being past dusk and thus no time to pay a call, the pirate ship landed without a care in the world – the officials here being as well-compensated for their blindness as the ones at the West India Docks, back in London – and the crew strolled into the streets.

Killian and his men chose a tavern and swaggered in, settling to their customary pursuits of drink, gambling, and eyeing up the serving wenches. He didn't go with them much. He was loyal to Milah's memory, in his fashion, and as he was already well aware that he would never find another woman to love as he had loved her, it seemed ridiculous even trying. But if they wanted to slide up next to him and give him doe-eyes, he had no objection to that. Slipped his arm around one and let her sit in his lap; she spoke no English and he only gutter French, but they understood each other quite well nonetheless. She was a brunette, as were most of the lasses who caught his eye, ghosts of Milah. Sometimes he paid them extra to leave and boast to his men about what a fine time they'd had, other times he took them back to the _Roger_ for a "nightcap," but he never asked their names or remembered them in the morning. It was balm for a broken heart, enough to keep him going until he could do what he needed. He didn't expect to live long after that, anyway. Gold would kill him. He'd made his peace with it. Usually.

He was in a strange dark mood on return to the ship, without company tonight. Lay in bed and stared at the shadows shifting on the cabin ceiling, and wondered when he had grown old. He was only thirty-two, born the same year as the Queen – exactly three months younger, in fact, having come into this world on St Bartholomew's day, 1819 – but sometimes he felt as if he'd lived several centuries. As if time had fallen away into a haze of irrelevance, marking the fact that he had now lived without Liam longer than he'd lived with him, and had nearly reached the same point with Milah.

Yet worst of all, there was nothing he could do about it. Every new day would come, and then pile up into months, and years. And then one of those days, without him noticing precisely when it had happened, he might not be able to recall how exactly her smile had looked, or how she tasted when she kissed him, or the sure stroke of her hand when she drew. Would not remember his brother's laugh, the way Killian always straightened his collar for him, the way the crew would have walked through hell for him, his stubbornness and loyalty and fierce, fierce love. And in no longer remembering, no longer understand the depths of what he had lost.

He feared time. Feared not having enough of it. Feared its eternity. Thought of all the clockwork men and all the turned hourglasses, the wheels and gears that drove the world forward. Wished he could get away from it, wished there was a land where time stopped. _Tick tock. Tick tock._ Every day, every moment, drawing him deeper into the darkness, where he had crawled to make the pain stop, to make it stop, and never found the way back out.

* * *

The day broke pale grey and sunless, and Killian stood in front of the looking glass, dressing carefully. Brown jacquard morning coat, black vest, white shirt with frilled sleeves, trousers and boots, his gloved false hand instead of his hook, so he bore a resemblance to a prosperous English gentleman and not an airship pirate in grimy black leather. Combed his hair, trimmed his sideburns, and barbered off his perpetually unshaven stubble. Rubbing his chin gingerly, he decided it might do, then slung his satchel over his shoulder. Time to find out just how much this little adventure had cost him.

The streets were almost empty, narrow windows shuttered and iron gates locked. Killian crossed the expansive green lawns of the Jardin des Tuileries, dew dripping from the trees and the mist lending everything a silvery, ethereal cast, then the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Saint-Honoré. Down the narrow lane beyond, and into the Place Vendôme. Edifices of creamy stone, massive old _h_ _ôtel particuliers,_ rose in a half-moon around the square, the great bronze column at the center with its statue of Napoleon, bracketed by unlit streetlamps. He crossed it, presented himself at the front portico of the _h_ _ôtel_ in the very center, and knocked.

After a long nerve-wracking moment, a white-gloved butler opened it, regarded him with that haughty Gallic look that every Frenchman seemed to have been born with, and arched a thin eyebrow. _"Votre nom et votre affaire, monsieur?"_

 _"Je m'appelle Capitaine Killian Jones. Votre maître m'attend."_ Two days ago, in fact, but never mind that.

The butler let out a small sigh at the indelicacy of English timekeeping and etiquette in general, but retreated into the house, leaving Killian tapping his foot and wondering if he should have brought his sword. He had several pistols in the satchel, but who knew what this mysterious bastard was up to? He did not intend to let his guard down for a moment.

After several minutes, the butler returned. "The master shall see you," he announced, having evidently decided to switch to English rather than suffer the indignity of hearing his mother tongue from the lips of a pirate. "Through that corridor and into the solarium, monsieur."

 _"Merci beaucoup."_ Killian swept him a flourishing bow, and proceeded down a long hall to the expansive, glass-paned room at the rear. It was as bedecked as lavishly as Versailles, crystal chandeliers and full-length mirrors, delicate chaises and claw-footed chairs, and aether lamps, rather than oil, burning with clear, fragile golden light against the grey of the morning.

In the middle, stirring his tea in a porcelain cup, sat a tall man in an exquisitely tailored suit, with dark copper skin and thick black curls tumbling luxuriantly to his shoulders. He was paging through a stack of Parisian dailies – _Le National, La Minerve,_ and the notorious rebel broadsheet, _Le P_ _ére Duchesne._ Without glancing up, he said in a crisp, cut-glass British accent, "Do come closer, Captain. I've ordered breakfast for us both, it should be just a moment."

"Ah – of course." Killian moved to take the other chair at the table. Feeling oddly out of his element, even though he was grateful not to have been turned summarily into the streets again, he waited as the other man finished his perusal, then looked up.

"You," he said. "At last. I was beginning to suspect I had placed my trust in the wrong pirate. Do you have the compass, then?"

"Aye."

"May I see it?"

"You may." Killian made no move to open the satchel. "If you have what I want in return."

"A fellow who does not mince words, I see. So tell me, Captain, how you explain your delay?"

"A. . . momentary lapse in judgment."

"Regrettable. Do you suspect there may be another one?"

"Not at all."

"One should surely hope so. Especially considering the lapse was of such magnitude to take precedence over your stated commitment to me. So, then. What became of him?"

Killian frowned. "Who?"

"Will Scarlet, of course."

"How did you – "

The man shrugged. "Firstly, I had you under surveillance, and secondly, I have the rather more mundane organ of the newspapers." He held out the morning edition of _Le National._ "The French are editorializing most gleefully on the present embarrassment for England. Indeed, it is all anyone can talk about. So tell me, why did you not merely put Scarlet overboard in the Channel and have done with it?"

"I find that the threat of violence often serves a man better than the actual application of it."

"Ah, a gentleman pirate. We shall have to discourse on our respective philosophies of power at a later date, Machiavelli and Marx and the rest – have you heard of Marx? A young Prussian rabble-rouser who publishes various socialist screeds, I find him appalling – but at the moment, I am more concerned with our present business. Ah, our food." The man smiled as the butler laid two settings of china and crystal, and began to serve them from steaming silver tureens: a traditional English breakfast, with bacon, eggs, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, black pudding, baked beans, sausages, and toast. Killian was in fact bloody hungry, having subsisted on a mostly liquid diet the past several days, but refrained from picking up knife and fork until his host had done likewise. They each tucked their napkins into their cravats, then began to eat.

Killian was still somewhat off his footing from the revelation that his potential patron had had him watched, though it did explain why he betrayed no surprise at his late arrival. "So," he said, when the silence stretched on. "Are you still interested in my services?"

"Indubitably, my dear Captain."

"Well then. I'll need to know who I'm working for."

"How discourteous of me. As was made known to you in the preliminary stages, I am late of the Ottoman Empire, though for political reasons I have chosen to seek sanctuary in Europe. It is no secret that it is a sham, a pale shadow of its glory days, dissolute and declining." His nostrils flared. "In any event, you may call me Jafar."

"A pleasure." Killian hefted the satchel. "You asked about the compass?"

"I did." Jafar sipped his tea, then set the cup elegantly back on the saucer. "As I have already requested once to see it, shall we not make it twice?"

Killian hesitated, then undid the buckle, reached in, and pulled it out. He handed it over to his host, who snapped open a small case, removed a jeweler's loupe, and studied it intently. "Magnificent," he murmured. "Just as I hoped. Exquisite."

"So then. You'll be paying for it, as agreed?"

"Patience." Jafar set down the compass and the loupe and leaned back. "You – or Will Scarlet, who was evidently the one to carry out the actual thieving – have done well, but surely you understand that that was only a very minor step. An audition piece, if you will. For what I propose, an actual expenditure of effort and risk will be required. At the end of it, assuming I am satisfied, we shall both have what we want. Which would be, to wit, Robert Gold dead at our feet. Do I have your attention, Captain?"

Killian was very still. At last he said tersely, "Aye."

"Good. I thought so. After all, breaking off our association at this point, no matter how lackadaisically you have hereto treated it, would not be the most sensible move for a wanted man, would it?" Jafar peeled an egg, placed it into the eggcup, and decapitated it with a spoon. "You must know you can't kill Gold by yourself. It's been what, nearly a decade of trying? Although I am not sure it _was_ trying, because the results are quite deplorable either way."

"I assure you, I've been doing everything I – "

"Don't fret. I don't require a testimonial. What I _will_ require, however, is results. Nor am I in the business of offering second chances, and you have already and unwisely burned a first one. But as it is rare to find a man as devoted to this project as you, I have decided to make an exception. I advise you, however, not to think that I will do so again. Time is precious, Captain, especially mine. Though once my purpose has been achieved, that will be of less moment. In fact, none whatsoever."

"How do you mean?"

Jafar smiled enigmatically. Then he said, "Killian Jones, born in 1819 in County Louth, Ireland. Brought to London at the age of five by his father Davy, subsequently abandoned, lived for three years on the streets. Found at the age of eight by his elder brother, Liam Jones, then a junior officer in His Majesty's Royal Navy, and brought aboard ship as a cabin boy. Grew up on the HMS _Jewel of the Realm,_ eventually achieving promotion to lieutenant at the age of seventeen, his brother having reached the rank of captain some years previously. In 1837, sailed to North America to assist the British Government in putting down the Canadian Rebellion, yet instead lost his brother and decided to turn pirate, emerging as one of the Crown's most dedicated and notorious foes. In 1844, lost his hand and his long-time lover, the former wife of our friend Robert Gold, who murdered said woman himself, before Jones' own eyes. In 1845, re-emerged as Captain Hook, selling food to starving peasants in Ireland during the potato famine one day and burglarizing innocent travelers the next. In 1848, smuggled weapons to the rebels during the Europe-wide revolts, for which he received yet another of several treason convictions and death sentences. Quite a life, wouldn't you say?"

Killian did his best to keep his expression under control. After a moment he said coolly, "And the point of that recitation was. . .?"

"To show that unlike you, I do not carelessly enter into commerce with individuals whom I know nothing about. And also that both of us, having pasts we would prefer to forget, are the ideal candidates for this work. What if they could simply. . . not be that way?"

"I still don't follow."

"I suppose that is preferable at this point." Jafar spread marmalade on his toast. "Ordering you to steal the compass was to see if you could achieve what I truly want from you. Robert Gold has in his possession a bottle, one of a set of three. I have, after considerable bother, expense, and misadventure, acquired the other two. I want the third. Procure it, and the reward would be. . ."

"What?"

"Why, more wealth than you can imagine."

"I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit."

"Of course. Pirate." Jafar raised a dark eyebrow. "I do not, however, mean the merely financial. I mean the sort of things you have wanted all your life. It _was_ a shame to lose your brother so early, wasn't it? Dashing captain, loyally serving the British Empire? And your love? Milah?"

Killian's throat was clenched hard. "And now you'll tell me that you have some deep admiration for the Empire? From your exile here in _la République?"_

Jafar laughed out loud. " _Liberté, égalité, fraternité_ _–_ how stirring, isn't it? A pity it will not outlive the year. Take it from me, Louis-Napoléon intends to reclaim imperial glory for himself and the Bonapartes. They've been plotting the coup since August, at Saint-Cloud. _Rubicon,_ I believe they call it, after Julius Caesar – a perilous individual to model oneself on, especially considering what came of his attempt to make himself an emperor. Do you have the Latin, Captain? Or Greek? I suppose not. A life of pillage and brigandry does not lend itself to study."

"You could stop it," Killian pointed out. "Sell the information. If you know so much."

"I could." Jafar shrugged. "But to what purpose? Kings rise and fall, and you and I have elected to serve none of them. Earthly power is played at by children who know very little of it, whereas I am concerned with its deepest workings. It will not surprise you to learn that I too am a sorcerer, but never part of that mob of infidels, idiots, and fools that it has pleased the Crown to call the 'Royal Society.' I don't suppose you realize how remarkable the English view of magic is, the number of peasants who practice it. In Russia, only the boyars may occupy themselves with such a thing; it is death for a serf to even speak those words, _zolotoy pyli,_ gold dust. Here in France and in the Papal States, the Catholic Church holds sway with tyranny and ignorance. Everywhere else in Europe, it is one of the two. Magic is a powerful man's pastime, or a madman's vain pursuit – strange how that should be the case, don't you think? Yet you English and your confounded populist spirit somehow carry on. Why is that?"

"I spend as little time as possible thinking about the English. I find it better for my sanity."

"Lies. You think of them always." Jafar's gaze had gone distant, opaque. "In certain things, I admire them. Yet even here in France, though they are commonly surprised that I speak French – _bien sûr, monsieur, et six autres –_ they grow used to it. They admire me, they wonder and marvel at me, they hang onto my every word. I am a pet, perhaps, a curiosity, but an adored and revered one. In England, always, I am a boy. They expect I am there to carry their luggage or to shine their shoes or to wait their tables, for I am a coolie and a servant and whatever else could I be? Which, of course, I am not, but one brown man looks very alike to another in the eyes of Great Britain and its East India Company, its Dark Continent, its old Jamaican sugar plantations and slave ships, its new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child. And you, Irish Catholic scum of the streets turned pirate, turning your back on the very Royal Navy that defeated Napoleon _la premiere –_ is it any wonder they loathe you in equal measure? There is nothing but rot at that country's heart, though I suspect I needn't tell you. When the three bottles are mine, it is one of the first things I shall see to."

"The third one of which you expect me to steal for you, from Robert Gold."

"Oh, I don't expect it. It is merely what will and must happen."

"And this will end with him dead, and everything he has ever worked for destroyed?"

"In a far more satisfying way than you can ever imagine, Captain."

Killian hesitated a final moment. He was well aware that he was caught in the eye of a serpent, that this was a dangerous and delicate dance that could end either with his revenge splendidly accomplished or he himself stabbed to death in a gutter, but there was no present alternative. He was also used to holding his own with treacherous business partners, lethal bedfellows, and even outright lunatics, and saw nothing Jafar could throw at him that he had not weathered many times before. The inconvenient obstacles had been removed, and now, at last, it was time.

"Well then," he said, and smiled, the merest baring of teeth. "I'd say you have yourself a pirate."

* * *

The London fog was yellow with burning coal, the smoke of a thousand chimneys, the pelting, acrid rain, and the dim glow of the streetlamps, lit even though it was the middle of the day. Despite the miserable weather, Emma was afoot, having told the hansom driver to drop her off several streets away; she always liked to keep her movements varied, never returning to one place for more than a day in a row or being seen consistently leaving another. With her boots, breeches, dark cloak, hood, and vest, she was barely recognizable as a woman, so that even if she was spotted, the observer would not connect the rather harried gentleman with the proper lady recently seen about the premises. She had been up half the night pursuing the lead Jefferson had given her; she knew who the Merry Men were, as did nearly everyone. They modeled themselves after the legendary thieves of the same name, heroic vigilantes to a destitute, dirty, hungry underclass. They had even saved her life once when she was delirious from hunger and cold and untreated pneumonia, allowing her to seek shelter and treatment at one of the hospitals for the poor. She felt a strange, unexpected twinge of conscience at the idea of taking one of them down now, in service of the man who everyone in the underworld unqualifiedly hated, but she didn't have room for their kind of scruples. Money was money, a job was a job. Though she'd still have to be careful. She didn't want this to result in Gold destroying the entire underworld, which might well be exactly what he was after. The only question was how to cut free in time.

Pushing the doubt firmly out of her mind, Emma turned into Harley Street and splashed down to Archie's. Rang his bell, then let herself in, glancing around warily. She hadn't been able to track down the Merry Men long enough to talk one of them into revealing the identity of their former partner in crime, anyway, but _something_ was going on. She'd never seen so many Royal Navy airships combing the skies, heard whispers of an ambush on the Thames, and she could put the pieces together well enough. Something, somewhere, had tipped them off, and she needed to be sure of what.

Emma rounded the corner into the waiting room, then crossed the floor, knocked on the doctor's office door – then, when she got no answer, frowned and pulled it open. "Archie, what – ?"

The doctor jerked upright and whirled around, pointing something at her, which it took Emma a baffled moment to recognize was actually a gun. She had never known Archie to wield a weapon or even raise his voice, being one of the gentlest and most trusting souls she had ever met, and stared at him, stunned. "What are you doing? It's me!"

"I – Emma." Archie stuffed the pistol out of sight. "I didn't recognize you. I – I thought – "

"What the hell were you doing?" Emma shut the door with a snap. "For that matter, what _have_ you been doing? Who did you think I was?"

"I. . ." Archie was turning a slow, florid crimson. "I. . . I found out the name of the ship. Hook's ship. It's the _Jolly Roger._ And he. . . he was here. In person."

"In _person?"_ Emma repeated, voice climbing several octaves. "Did you think I was _him?_ What was he doing here? Did he learn you were snooping after him, did – "

Archie held up his hands, cringing against the onslaught of questions. Biting back her first instinct to pick him up by the ankles, turn him upside down, and shake him, Emma took a seat and badgered him until he came out with the full and remarkable story. Had been to the Admiralty, made them suspicious, hoped he hadn't done her any damage, then had been working late the next night and emerged to be taken prisoner by the very pirate captain himself, who wanted a wolfbite potion for his accomplice. This Archie had felt it prudent to supply, but the pirate had departed halfway through the night and left his accomplice. He had never returned.

"And that's it?" Emma repeated. "He just vanished into thin air? What happened to the other one? What else did he say or do? I want a detailed record, I want – "

"The second one, he. . ." Archie was looking deeply unhappy. "He. . . ah. . ."

"Oh God. Tell me you didn't put him in the cellar with Ruby."

"By the time we realized the. . . situation, it was light out, I didn't dare risk anyone seeing him leave the house." Archie gazed at her imploringly. "Just until tonight, when. . ."

"Archie. Attic or cellar?"

"I – he – "

"We'll start with attic." Emma got to her feet and strode out of the office, Archie sprinting after her in a panic. Started up the narrow stairs, surreptitiously unholstering her derringer and checking that the lone bullet was in the chamber. The small-caliber "stocking gun" was only fatal at nearly point-blank range, such as in a disagreement over cards in a smoky saloon, but she didn't want to kill the fugitive – just, if need be, hurt him enough to stop him from getting away. She needed him alive, needed whatever elusive connection to his (former?) captain he possessed, and every potential informant was different. Some broke at the first sign that she'd come to play rough, while others held out to the bitter end. Most could resist all the vinegar in the world, but turned into babbling fools at a few drops of honey. Her mind was already working, sorting through the possibilities, as she mounted the last few steps, Archie still on her heels trying vainly to dissuade her, and jammed the attic door open.

At once, the blanketed shape that had been fast asleep on the broken chaise longue sat bolt upright, rolled over, hit the floor, and ran as fast as he could toward the skylight – at which he did not get far, due to a miscellaneous heap of junk clipping him smartly across the knees and sending him sprawling. He was no more than twenty-five, with short, spiky brown hair, big dark eyes, and prominent ears, and currently looked disheveled, breathless, and heartily outraged – he had only seen Archie, not yet her. "Bloody hell, doc, if you wanted to scare me to bloody death there were easier ways than poppin' up like a – "

Emma recognized him. Recognized him immediately, in fact, and felt her stomach lurch at the unfathomable stroke of luck. It was him, the thief who had stolen from the Exhibition, the one she had been trying to track down the Merry Men in order to identify. Damn, was Archie actually keeping London's most wanted criminal tucked up here like a houseguest, waiting to let him go when it was dark? It was either boundless compassion or terminal naïveté, and as the young man continued to stare around wildly, Emma changed tack. She stowed the derringer back in its holster, then put on her most concerned face and ran toward him. "Oh, I'm so terribly sorry!" she cried, throwing herself to her knees. "That was me, I didn't see – oh my, I didn't know that – are you all right?"

The young man stiffened, with the reflexive tension of someone expecting to be caught, but Emma kept her expression utterly guileless and innocent, brimming with solicitous concern, her long hair spilling out of the hood. She snatched up his hand and pressed it to her bosom, the Angel of Charity personified, leaning into him. "Oh, sir. Please tell me you're not hurt."

His eyes took her in from head to toe, clearly thinking that he would perform a thousand pratfalls if it meant a beautiful blonde woman would swoop down on him and express swooning concern for his well-being. "Aye, I'm – feeling much better," he managed, blinking. "Not a thing wrong, actually. Rubbish leapt out and ambushed me when I wasn't lookin'."

"Oh, I'm _so_ glad," Emma simpered, clinging to him like a limpet as she helped him to his feet, dusting him off all over. "I'm so clumsy, I didn't even know that door stuck. My sister has to see Dr. Hopper, but you know – " she giggled fatuously – "I have to chaperone her and it's _so_ dreadfully dull, but I was looking for clothes to get out of these _rags_ , my dress was _ruined_ by the rain and I had to borrow _these,_ but do you think I want to walk around looking like an _undertaker,_ it's hideous, I don't know what to – "

Jaw agape, the young man stared at Archie, who was still lurking guiltily in the doorway, and then back at her. "I, er. I'll be glad to help you find some clothes to get out of, miss. Er, I mean into. _Into._ Not into you, I mean. The clothes." He paused. "Bloody hell."

"I'll just. . ." Archie sidled onto the stairway landing. "Be going, then."

"Yes," Emma ordered him. "Go see my – my _sister,_ you don't need to look after me – I can take care of myself, can't I?" She giggled, pressing herself into the young man's side. "You never told me you had a secret _visitor!_ This is all so terribly exciting, I don't know what to say!"

Archie, clearly suspecting that she had lost her mind, backed away slowly, though not without one final look begging her to, in fact, not say anything at all. Then he turned and fled down the stairs, in order to get as far away as possible before she became any further unhinged. This left Emma in undisputed custody of her man (or one of them, at least) and she had to think quickly about how she wanted to proceed. The first and most obvious option was likely also the easiest. "What's your name?" she cooed, selecting one of her own prepared aliases. "I'm Elizabeth Turner, it's _so_ lovely to meet you."

"I'm. . ." The young man hesitated. "Bill. Bill. . . Crimson."

"Really?" She fluttered her eyelashes at him, at the same time trying to decide if that matched anyone she'd heard about. It was obviously a false name, and quite a bit clumsier than hers. Keeping tight hold of him, she towed him down the stairs to the second floor and into one of the gloomy sitting rooms, talking all the while, and artfully managed to bring the subject around to Captain Hook and the rumors aswirl in London. She simply couldn't _believe_ that someone could do that, her father (a high-ranking civil servant in Her Majesty's Government) was utterly _obsessed_ with bringing pirates to justice, but she had always thought them terribly romantic herself, on and on – while at the same time plying "Bill" with brandy from a bottle in the cupboard, insisting it was good for the nerves. She was just breathlessly revealing Elizabeth's deepest and most secret desire to run away and have marvelous adventures when he interrupted, "It's not bloody like that, you know."

"What?" Emma pouted prettily. "What do you mean?"

"I – knew him, all right? Captain Hook."

She gasped, pressing her fingers to her mouth. "Was he _dashing?"_

"No!" Bill took a bracing gulp of brandy. "He was a two-faced, deceitful, back-stabbing, black-hearted bastard, and for some bloody reason I chose to take up with him anyway. For which he repaid me by abandoning me and leaving me to get hung out to dry in London, now that I can't get into the Night Market no more, take all the profits from our little venture for his-damn-self and – " With that, realizing his danger, he screeched to a halt.

Emma blinked. "What do you mean?"

Bill searched her face, apparently found it utterly undisturbed by the remotest notion that he was a wanted fugitive, and relaxed fractionally. "Nothing. But trust me, it would do us all a bloody favor if your father put 'im out of business. Damned if I know where he's scarpered off to now, but I'll let you in on a little secret. The ship – his ship – it's got a false registration. The _Red Beauty._ That's what they note it as whenever he's passin' through the West India Docks, because he's got half of 'em in his bloody pocket to boot."

Emma had to work hard to keep the delight out of her expression. "Ooh," she said instead, doubtfully. "That does sound rather wicked. Is he truly –? "

"He's a bloody arsehole, is what he is." Brooding into his glass, Bill polished off the rest in a pull. "Now, look. You'll not be telling anyone you met me here, all right?"

"Why? You're not wicked too, are you?"

"Course not. Just rather you didn't." Under his breath, he added, "Though I'm fucked anyway, so what's it bloody matter?"

"Oh, Bill, I'm sure you didn't do _anything_ wrong." With these and other platitudes, Emma kept up the "conversation" for another five or ten minutes, as not to be suspicious, then affected to hear Dr. Hopper calling for her – doubtless her sister's session was over and they had to be off, but it had been _so_ lovely meeting him and if he was ever visiting in the future, she'd simply _adore_ to see him again. She leaned close as she said so, as if to give him the impression that he was free to use his imagination as to what that might entail. No proper Victorian young lady would be alone in the company of a young man without a chaperone, so them having had this conversation at all was, she conveyed, delightfully scandalous and she did so hope he did not think less of her for it. With that, she tripped out of the room – then the instant the door shut behind her, dropped the pretense and began to run.

With barely a word to Archie to assure him that she wasn't going to snitch on him, Emma pulled up the hood of her cloak and hurried out into the rain. A swift change of clothes and a wet cab ride later, she was at the West India Docks, posing as a wealthy merchant's wife insistent that the port authorities were overcharging them on their export tariffs, and demanding to see their books to examine for herself. Cowed, confused, and clearly not used to dealing with assertive women – she overheard more than one comment that her husband _should_ have sent a solicitor or a secretary to handle this – they did as ordered, scuttling to fetch the records and allowing her to page through them, all the while insisting that their accuracy was impeccable and if madam could simply take their word for it, everything would be solved. Emma supposed that if Hook wasn't the only one taking advantage of their willingness to commit fraud, then indeed they might not want anyone taking too close a look at their cooked books, but she wasn't here to put the fear of God (or at least HM Board of Customs) into them. She was just looking for. . . aha.

Her finger stopped on one of the lines, noting that the _Red Beauty_ had been in port just over a week ago, and according to the manifest, had arrived from Paris. It was possible that Hook had lied about that as well, but it was more likely that he was confident – overconfident – that between the false name and the fact that they were all paid off anyway, he hadn't bothered. Flipping back through the pages, she discovered long gaps where they hadn't recorded anything at all, ports of origin that were clearly flagrant fabrications (Svalbard, home to one of the richest aether deposits in the world, was crawling with gunships and harvesters from every country in Europe – not even a pirate would be able to get in and out of there incognito) and here and there, a grain of apparent truth. Arriving from Stockholm, Vienna, Dublin, Prague – but most often, Paris. He must have some kind of established base there, some kind of hideout.

Emma's lips pursed speculatively, wondering if she was going to have to find an excuse to make a visit to _La Ville-Lumière._ If she was him, she'd be avoiding London until the heat died down, but then again he had been here, in Archibald Hopper's office, just a few nights ago. He clearly thought he played by an entirely different set of rules, that the limitations of mere mortals did not apply to him, and she was well aware of how hubris and arrogance sometimes took her marks down before she had to do any work herself. She could always return to the attic and Bill, try to squeeze him for more information, but he too would be trying to get the hell out of the city, and she couldn't count on him as a resource.

Work done, Emma snapped the logbook shut, warned the docksmen that she was still very displeased, and headed back into the city, thinking hard. Bill had mentioned something curious about the Night Market shutting him out, and while difficult, it would not be impossible to track down his true identity through it. Either that or –

She passed a newsie-boy, and stopped dead.

Blinking from the front page of all the papers was the face of the very young man she had entertained with her acting skills earlier that afternoon. Above, the headlines blared: **BRITAIN'S ENEMY REVEALED: EXHIBITION BURGLED BY FORMER MEMBER OF FIENDISH 'MERRY MEN.'.** It turned out that the suspect was one Will Scarlet, five-and-twenty years of age or thereabouts, born in London, once part of the thieves' guild, now an associate of notorious rebel and traitor, Captain Hook. Any citizen found to be aiding or sheltering him would likewise be subject to the fullest wrath of the law.

Emma snorted; "Bill Crimson," her left foot. She did hope that Archie saw this, as it might help dissuade him from his habit of stashing dangerous individuals on his premises, but if not, there was nothing she could do to help him. Pressing a distracted thruppence into the greedy hand of the newsie, she took the paper and stowed it in her satchel, then glanced up at the sky. The drowned light was receding from the clouds and the cobbles, a hoary violet pall falling over them instead, and Emma waited until it was sufficiently advanced for her purposes. Then she stepped off into an alley, pulled her key from her bodice, and a moment later, was inside the Night Market, exhaling in relief at the familiarity, the closest thing she had to home.

Emma bought a Cornish pasty and set off. She needed new cartridges for her derringer and a few other items, and she'd be here until midnight at least. She hadn't given up on finding the Merry Men either, whether or not she knew Will Scarlet's name, and was toying with the idea of trying to find which London firm had the false papers for the _Red Beauty_ on file; it wouldn't be too hard, if she put her mind (or Archie's) to it. Unraveling that spider's web might reveal a wealth of information on the pirate's dealings, hiding places, assets, and strategies, but she couldn't decide if she should pull the trigger just yet. If Hook caught wind of it, or if he was suddenly exposed and bereft of his asylums, he'd run for it and hide out God-knew-where, and she wanted to lure him in, make him think the danger had passed. If the news of the Royal Navy ambush was legitimate. . . well, that was a difficulty, but she'd think of something.

Emma dodged an oneiromancer wanting to read her dreams for a silver penny and an eyetooth, looking around for Jefferson's booth. Not that he was in the least likely to be helpful two times in a row, but as usual, he would be her first point of contact. But as much as she squinted, she couldn't catch a glimpse of him.

That in itself wasn't terribly surprising. Even in the black market, Jefferson was not always the most welcome of individuals, and if he had once more been accosting passing magicians and ordering them to produce something other than rabbits out of hats, he could have decided it a wise thing to lie low for a while. And the Market changed nightly, vendors and customers alike. She didn't want to get herself too indebted to him, anyway; Jefferson's favors never came cheap. Still, in his absence, that meant she should find someone else to assist the investigation, and she was just starting to run through potential options – perhaps Marco, the kindly old woodworker who made magical toys, or Leroy, the dwarf who worked long spells in the aether mines up north and was as gossipy as a Strand fishwife. If he was down in London, he was a valuable resource for finding out who was buying the most quantities of the golden dust and where it was going. If Gold did want Hook dead for personal reasons, it stood to reason that the pirate might be interfering with his power supply. Or perhaps –

Emma, however, never got a chance to finish that thought. At that moment, a frightened babel of voices broke out, and she was jostled from side to side as several personages hurried past. She frowned, but didn't see any reason for alarm, and turned back to her investigation. Marco, it would have to be. With the onset of the autumn gales, aether storms would be coming thick and fast, meaning that Leroy would have all the work he could sink a pickax into. So she just had to –

Then it came again. Louder and sharper, a crack like musket fire, a sudden and general disturbance, followed by an incandescent white explosion – shouting and shoving, the crowded square tripping and trampling, and a complete panic as everyone fled in all directions at once. But Emma herself remained rooted to the spot, unable to believe what she was seeing.

The Night Market was under attack.


	5. Chapter 5

All the running lights were quenched, all the shields were raised, the cloaking device whirring and ticking like a clockwork heart, and all the guns primed and ready to fire – if they were caught again, to hell with secrecy and subterfuge, the only hope would be to blast their way free – as Killian Jones steered the _Jolly Roger_ through the dark skies of London, carefully evading the spotters' beacons that winked like earthbound stars from the belfry of St. Paul's, Big Ben, and somewhere from a dark, forbidding old stone mansion in Grosvenor Square, the headquarters of the Royal Society. _Where is Gold most likely to keep one magical artifact of staggering power?_ Surely not in the Society archives, where any meddling junior member could accidentally stumble on it. Perhaps in Kensington Palace itself, where he could keep the best eye on it. Probably not at his alma mater of Christ Church, in Oxford, and certainly not in any of the working-class slums of Glasgow where he'd grown up. Aye, then. Kensington seemed the most likely option, but even Killian would need a formidable plan of attack before attempting to break in there. From time to time, other petty thieves or underworld impresarios decided to take their chances trying to get at the priceless wealth, the staggering power of the treasures said to be hidden therein. None of them were ever heard of again.

Well then. Time to start thinking. His new patron had supplied him with a few useful odds and ends, as well as a considerable advance in cash and his trump card, which Killian hoped would not be needed. Either way, however, he should get a bloody move on. Jafar was expecting a progress report in a fortnight, and the tone in which he had said it implied that if Killian had no progress to report, that would shortly be the least of his concerns. And now that he had shut himself of Scarlet (he hoped he didn't run into the bugger accidentally; _that_ would be awkward) he fondly hoped that the Night Market would see fit to let him back in. If not, well. . . it would be a challenge, but he liked those fine. Some sorts more than others.

Killian's eyes swept the rooftops of London and the black-paint spill of the Thames, trying to judge a suitable landing spot. He didn't want to set down in the middle of another ambush, and nor to return to his customary berth at the West India Docks; it was a fair wager they'd already dug up that little connection and hauled off the poor old embezzling port authority to prison or the noose. Even if not, it was still not a wise idea – it made him predictable, traceable, and if there was a general alert out for them, he'd have to pay all of London to keep their mouths shut, and that was clearly never going to happen.

At last, Killian selected a remote, rundown outpost on the far side of Southwark, among unused warehouses and broken brick pilings, tenements and wharfs that looked as if they hadn't been rebuilt since the Great Fire. This was known territory for some of the more monstrous elements of the underworld, and he checked that his pistol was loaded with silver bullets; after all the trouble he had gone to in order to de-wolf Will, the irony would be literally murderous if he got attacked by one now. But there was a shallow delta to land the _Roger_ on, and as long as the cloaking device held out, they should be safe. He eased her in and guided her to a halt, dark, fetid water slopping at the bow as the anchor was dropped.

No ambush. He was already doing better than last time. Killian pulled up his flight goggles and wiped his face, leaving a long smear of grime on the sleeve of his jacket, then called, "Mr. Smee. I'm out to make a few enquiries. I want the ship fully repaired and ready to fly to Africa if need be, by the time I return." They'd made it back from Paris all right, but the broken timbers and the stolen lodestone had been fighting him most of the way, and they definitely did not want to take their chances with a second hasty exit. "Is that clear?"

"Aye, Cap'n."

"Good." Buckling on his sword, Killian strode to the side, then jumped onto the mossy, rotten quay, which creaked alarmingly beneath his boots. He turned up the collar of his coat, then checked the sky; still a good while before dawn. Time enough to take his chances, then.

He strolled into the dark den of buildings, broken windows gazing down like cataract-blinded eyes, and chose the first likely-looking door. Realizing that if the Night Market was still not disposed to let him in, this was liable to be very unpleasant, he removed the key from his pocket and jammed it in all at once, before he could do something stupid like lose his nerve. It didn't burn him like last time, and it even turned. But when the door swung open, it revealed. . . nothing. Just a dark, dusty, empty space, cobwebbed and cold, no bigger than a closet. He stared at it, then blinked several times, as if in expectation that this would somehow alter the situation. It did not. How could it just be. . . gone?

Clearly, something had happened while he was otherwise occupied, and something big. More than just the Royal Navy being conveniently at hand to ambush him, more than him dumping Will Scarlet into the middle of a city frothing for his head (he felt a brief twinge of guilt, then reminded himself that he'd done nothing wrong) and it would greatly befit him to discover what. The total disappearance of the Night Market (if that was indeed what this was, and not just a signal of his continuing disfavor) would send shock waves through the underworld, leave it broken up and on the run – far easier to be rounded up and hunted down. _Just as the Royal Society has wanted to do for damn well ages._

Thinking of that, and everything else, decided Killian very firmly indeed that this was no coincidence. Pulling the key out and swinging the door shut, he set off deeper into the narrow alleys of Southwark, past wooden signs creaking in the wind, only a few streetlamps to light a lost traveler's way. There _were,_ however, plenty of taverns and opium-dens and houses for other sorts of pleasure, red glass lanterns casting bloody shadows. He paused before one such establishment, tempted – not due to a sudden and unavoidable carnal itch that had to be scratched, but rather because whores were inveterate and well-informed gossips – then decided against it. Most of them were ordinary sorts, oblivious to the magical underworld and happy to stay that way, knowing what was good for them. He wouldn't find what he needed here.

Another few blocks, and his gourmand's eye lit upon a suitable establishment: the White Rabbit. It was one he'd patronized before, and where not even he was the most notorious of the clientele. The owner was rumored to be a vampire, so you had to stay on your toes (as well as wonder what went into the drinks) but it was an underworlders' haunt, and thus likely up to date on whatever scuttlebutt there was to be had. So he came to a precise halt, made sure his gun was loose in the holster, and ducked under the dark, dripping lintel.

Despite the late hour it was crowded, packed up the walls toward the low, smoke-blackened beams, and he had to edge and jostle through tables and booths and boots to the back corner, where he took a seat and signaled the bartender. Presently the appropriate wench was dispatched with the appropriate poison, and Killian took a deep swig, letting the rum run down the back of his throat. He always felt more whole, more held together in all his shattered pieces, when he had a drink. Not that he couldn't live without it; just that it steadied him, drowned out the voices for a while. He tossed the wench a coin, and as she reached for it, caught her wrist in his hook and pinned it. "What's happened to the Night Market?"

Looking startled, the girl tried to free herself. "I don't – something's happened to it?"

"Aye, otherwise I wouldn't be asking." He smiled at her – charmingly, but with teeth. "If you don't know, how about you go find me someone who does, eh? Discreetly, and there's more where that came from." He nodded at the coin, lying shining on the table.

Flustered, the maid promised she would, pulled away and scooped up the coin, then hurried into the crowd. Killian took another sip, glancing around for a second source – never wise to put all of one's eggs in the same basket, and it would be useful to see if everyone had the same tale, or if it was nothing but wild hearsay and speculation. He was still clinging onto the possibility that nothing had happened at all, and it was just one of the Market's quirks – perhaps he could find someone else who could get in and finagle them to let him tag along – get on with it and do what he'd came for, find the way, give Jafar what he wanted and be sure it was all –

These and other such thoughts were flapping to and fro in Killian's head, like a flock of birds startled off their perch, and he was not having much success in chasing any of them down. But that was when, all at once, they ceased to matter. Shriveled up and faded out like they had never been, and the only blessed thing he could do was stare.

For that, just then, was when he saw her.

* * *

Emma Swan still had no idea how she had gotten out of the pandemonium of the burning Night Market, as men in blue uniforms, wearing bronze masks and armed with truncheons, descended like a plague of locusts, setting stalls alight and harrowing out their terrified owners. A few tried to fight back with hastily conjured spells; Emma heard the flare and then the sickening thud, could see bodies sprawled unmoving, steam rising from them. She did not stop for anything, did not look back, head down and running for all she was worth, until she found a door and toppled through it, slamming it behind her. Then she was in the quiet, dark streets of London, and the chaos and screams and smoke might have been a thousand miles away. Or more, depending on where the Market had been tonight.

Emma stood gulping air, scrubbing the stinging soot out of her eyes, trying to recollect herself. She had a horrible suspicion about what had just happened, and would have given anything to be wrong – if she could even find a way to go about investigating it. But Gold had wanted the Night Market and the underworld brought down for gods' years, and now that he had cozened a certain bounty hunter into his service, someone who was a part of that world and knew exactly where to find it. . . keep tabs on her, her whereabouts, and then when she went back in, have a squad of storm troopers ready to follow her. Make it plain that when he said he would destroy whoever had stolen from the Exhibition, and anyone who may have helped them, he meant it.

An involuntary shudder rattled through Emma. If she was the one responsible for this. . . plenty of the underworlders would see it that way, that she had already sold out by agreeing to work for their supreme enemy, and was now a traitor to be hunted down. But what was she supposed to do? Refuse? She would conveniently be made to disappear as well. Caught in a trap on either side, used as a pawn in Gold's game. _Son of a bitch._ She had better hope that his money wasn't just spun straw, that his promise to turn her into a great lady, set for life, was more than just opportune lies. Otherwise, she had nothing and no one.

Emma bit her lip until she tasted blood, took one more steadying breath, then set off. There was a tavern in Southwark she needed to get to – a rough and seedy place, like most of where she spent her time, and an underworlders' haunt to boot, but it was where one could often find a dangerous young magician known only as Pan, a rising star of sorts in this line of work. He was the kind of individual who should only be approached if there was no other choice, but Emma did not currently see that there _was_ another. Pan was extremely good at vanishing those who needed to vanish for a while, and if she could strike a deal with him and put herself under his protection, even the most wrathful underworld vigilantes would think twice before going after her. What such protection was likely to cost her was a thought that Emma determinedly pushed aside. Raw survival, of saving her own neck, was her priority right now. Everything else could wait.

The moon was low in the sky by the time she, having taken a long and circuitous detour to avoid the Met and their werewolves hunting for stragglers, finally stumbled up to the tavern – the White Rabbit, which she had always found a rather whimsical name for a place that saw the kind of business this one did. Pulling up her hood, she checked once more that she had not been followed, and stepped inside.

As usual, it was crowded, dim, and smoky, patrons sipping absinthe and amaretto and even more exotic liqueurs from grimy glasses, puffing on pipes, playing faro and dead man's draw with tattered cards, or keeping to themselves in corners, veiled by dark hoods or masks, watching with glittering eyes. Emma glanced around, checking if Pan had set up shop in his usual spot, but she didn't see him. Not that that meant he wasn't here. Sometimes you had to sit down and call for him, and then look to see him next to you as if he'd been there all along. Sometimes you'd see a shadow moving on the wall, but with no body to cast it, and he would arrive much later. She took a deep breath, and started to go find which one it was this time – but never got there.

For that, just then, was when she saw him.

For a long, stunned instant, Emma did not believe her eyes. Could not believe that she had gotten so ungodly lucky as to literally stumble across her target when she hadn't even really been looking for him – but it _was_ him, it had to be. She recognized the face from the records she'd looked up, and a gleaming metal hook served in place of his left hand, resting casually on the scarred wood of the table. She had to fight the shock she felt at his appearance; the grainy black-and-white daguerreotypes did not do him justice. He had a striking, physical, uncommon beauty, almost faerie-like, and it put her utterly on her guard, raised her highest walls. Men who looked like that tended to take ruthless advantage of it, and she already knew exactly what he was. Will Scarlet had told her. If she played this right, she could be handing the pirate over to Gold by sunrise. She just had to be careful.

Decision made, Emma loosened her hair to tumble attractively on her shoulders, and undid her bodice by several notches, enough to look as if she might just spill out of it. Then she made across the room toward him like a homing pigeon, leaned down to bring her bosom to within less than six inches of his eyes, and breathed, "What are _you_ having tonight, handsome?"

He stared at her, momentarily and completely deprived of the power of speech, mouth hanging open and eyes glazed over. Quite pleased with this effect, Emma took advantage of it to slide into the chair across from him, letting her knee brush tantalizingly against his. She picked up the rum bottle and poured herself a few fingers, then threw it back in one gulp, as he continued to stare at her as if an angel had descended from heaven and then proceeded to transform into a succubus from hell. "Cat got your tongue?"

"I." He shook himself, blinking. "A _very_ good evening to you too, love."

"Mmm-hmm." Emma slid in still closer and poured him a second tumbler of rum as well. Still unable to take his eyes off her, he put it down by reflex, some of the golden liquid dribbling down his chin as he missed his mouth. She reached out one finger and daintily caught the droplets, sucking them off, and he appeared to forget how to breathe altogether.

With her mark thus rendered in such an impressionable state, it was extremely easy for Emma to sink her claws in. She tossed the subsequent shots of rum over her shoulder, making sure he drank his, as she reached out and curled her fingers around the cool metal. "I have a confession to make. I want to know how you got the hook. You hear _so_ many stories."

"So you know who I am, and you won't even tell me your name? We're just two ships passing in the night, then?"

"Passing closely, I hope."

She continued to caress the hook, as if to give him an idea of what _else_ she might be capable of doing with her hands if offered opportunity, and poured him another drink, which he regarded with amusement. "You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were trying to get me drunk, which is usually my tactic."

"What's wrong, Captain?" She reached under the table, stroked his leather-clad thigh. "Can't hold your rum?"

"No, not only can I hold it, but I can carry it right out the door." His face was very close to hers, his eyes startlingly blue in the low light, his breath hot on the bare tops of her breasts, as he tapped her nose with one ringed finger. "So, love. What do you say we set sail? Come back with me for a nightcap, or shall I find someone else?"

No chance of letting him get away now. And she needed to get a good look at his ship, be able to describe it, and if it was still aboard, retrieve the compass. After that, she'd be in prime position to pass the details onto Gold, and prepare to set the final trap. She didn't need Pan's protection at all if she finished the job, and she got up at once, letting him wrap his arm around her waist as they navigated out of the White Rabbit, into the dark labyrinth of Southwark. She kept a sharp eye on the turns and shortcuts he took, noting that he was clearly not about to run the risk of landing at the West India Docks anymore. If she could stall him until dawn, it would be much harder for him to slip out undetected, or at least give her time to get a message to Gold. Thus as they turned into sight of a decrepit quay, she pretended to stumble. "I – I think I need a rest."

"Oh, no need, no need!" The pirate scooped her off her feet and swung her across his chest. "I've carried rum barrels heavier than you!"

She giggled giddily as he strode with her up the plank of – she hadn't seen it at first, but somehow there it was, a fine airship with glowing windows, a black silk zeppelin, and cannons crowding the ports, scuffed mahogany siding and the faint, painted-over Nelson's chequey that signaled this had indeed once been a Royal Navy ship of the line. Fifth or sixth rate, Emma guessed from the guns, a small, fast attack frigate instead of one of the massive, fortress-like first rater men-of-war that patrolled both sea and sky. "Behold!" its captain announced, with inebriated delight. "The Rolly Joger!"

"Captain!" One of the crew members, a short stout man in a red cap, goggled at them. "I wasn't expecting you back so soon, we haven't finished the repairs – and are you sure you should be taking a woman aboard now, they have to have spies out looking for – "

Not wanting him to develop this line of thought any further, Emma seized hold of the captain's lapels as he put her down, pulling his face toward her. "I seem to recall that a nightcap was promised," she purred, tossing her hair. "Find one, and I'll be waiting."

Redcap seemed inclined to further objections as Emma picked up her skirts and flounced across the deck, and the captain was detained to talk him out of them – a state of affairs which suited her just fine, as she opened the door and darted into the cabin, using her few precious moments to scour it for anything that looked remotely like a compass. She was thusly occupied when she heard footsteps crossing the deck, and straightened up just in time as he sauntered in, raising an eyebrow. "I do hope you haven't changed your mind?"

"No," she murmured, "just got tired of waiting." And dragged him in, opened her mouth, and kissed several sorts of bejesus out of him.

He jerked, his lips hot and insistent against hers, responding at once, tongues and teeth scraping and tasting, good enough that she let herself enjoy it – for just the barest instant – before she got back to business. They rocked on the spot, and then she swung him around and started guiding him toward his bed, where he went more than willingly. Oh good, so he was the kind of man who liked a woman who took charge, at which she was about to do far more than he ever bargained for. She kept kissing him, grasping his collar with one hand as she reached down with the other and removed the derringer from its thigh holster. She pushed him down onto the bed – and then, as he reached for the laces of her bodice with his hook, clearly intending to tear them off, she brought her hand up in a fast, sharp movement, pressing the barrel just above his left ear. "Don't move," she whispered. _"Killian Jones."_

He went very still, understandably somewhat slow to change his appraisal of the situation from "passionately kissing beautiful woman" to "beautiful woman holding a gun to head." His gaze flickered over her, as if wagering whether he could plunge his hook into her heart before she had time to get the shot off, but seemed to realize that this would in fact end fatally for him. A corner of his mouth turned up in a mocking smile. "What's this now, love?"

"You're a clever man, Captain." She straddled him, making sure she kept an eye on the hook, and rolled her hips, just to be sure he was still distracted. He was indeed, most _greatly_ distracted; she could feel it firm between her legs, and that little side effect just might not subside, if she was clumsy. How terrible of her. "Figure it out."

"Who are you working for?" He lifted his hand and ran a sensuous finger down her cheek, lingering in the hollow of her breastbone. "You do make quite a delicious pirate. I don't think I've ever seen the like, except for the legend of Miss Bonny. And nor am I Calico Jack Rackham, I assure you. A man who doesn't fight for what he wants, deserves what he gets."

"Who says I'm working for anyone?" Emma gave him a dangerous, sleek little smile. "The compass. I want it."

"The. . . compass?" Jones echoed blankly. "Oh. That. Well, I'm terribly sorry, my darling, but I'm afraid you're too late. I've already sold it."

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret," Emma breathed, bending closer, her loosened hair tumbling in fragrant clouds around his face. "I'm quite good at knowing when someone is _lying_ to me. So if you wanted to try that again. . .?"

"Going to torture it out of me?" His lips split in a dark, feral smile that she felt to the back of her stomach – and other places. "Come now, darling, there must be more enjoyable things to do with me, on my back in bed – or would you prefer we changed places?"

"Not a chance." Emma cocked the derringer, in case the particulars of the situation had managed to escape him. She reached down with her other hand and unclicked the hook from its brace, lifted it to her mouth and breathed on it lightly, then tossed it across the room, out of his reach. Carefully, keeping a sharp eye on him for any other weapons he might suddenly produce from about his person (he was most certainly happy to see her, but might yet have a gun in his pocket) she slid backwards off him and ordered him to his feet. He stood facing her, still _en dishabille,_ buttons of his shirt undone almost to his stomach (she was not distracted by the sight of his lean, dark-furred chest in the least). Completely untroubled, grinning offensively.

"Well?" she snapped, jerking the gun in illustration. "Hand it over."

Jones shrugged, one dark eyebrow still cocked, then turned away and rummaged in the drawers by the bed, as she tensed, waiting for him to come up with a pistol of his own, but instead he held up a heavy golden compass by the chain. "This compass, you mean?"

"Yes!" She snatched at it, but he jerked it away, still grinning. "I'm warning you. Hand it over, that's all I want, and then – "

"And then?" he repeated. "On my ship, among all my men, you're just going to stroll out, sweetheart? After we went through all sorts of bother to acquire it in the first place?" He sauntered closer, utterly unfazed by the way she trained the gun on the center of his chest, leaning in to press himself against the barrel, sharing, stealing her breath, mouth following hers. "You should have thought this through _just_ a little better."

Emma pulled the gun free and repositioned it between his eyes. "I've thought this through just fine. Now." She reached for the compass, but couldn't quite pull it loose; his grip was unyieldingly strong. "Do I need to remind you of the circumstances?"

"Not in the least." He grinned. "But there's no call for this unpleasantness. You are a beautiful woman, and I. . . well, I consider myself an honorable man, a man with a code. If you wanted to. . ." Somehow, impossibly, he got closer. The – the – what the hell was he doing, she was holding a gun on him and the son of a bitch was brushing her nose with the lightest of kisses! "Say. . . make a bargain. . . I'm sure an accommodation could be reached."

For a stomach-lurching moment, Emma was seriously tempted. More than that, really; it was a deep, visceral _need,_ and that seriously alarmed her. She was no stranger to people attempting to seduce her, not in this line of work, and as well demonstrated with both Will Scarlet and now Killian Jones himself, it was one of her most potent weapons. But she wasn't supposed to – _want_ to. Especially not with someone like _him,_ what all her trust issues and weaknesses would look like in human form. Yet he'd gotten under her skin already, her nose full of the scent of him, her lips still tasting like him, and that was unforgivable. She shoved back, reestablishing what space she could between them, and twisted the gun into his temple, hard enough to leave a mark. "Give it," she said, low and very evenly. "Or I shoot."

He blinked, momentarily nonplussed that there could be a woman alive capable of resisting his charms, then bared his teeth at her, in something that was not quite a smile. "As you wish," he said with a martyred shrug, and opened his fingers, letting the compass drop with a clank to the floor. "I hope you won't regret this, darling."

"I won't," Emma breathed, not daring to take her eyes off him long enough to pick it up. She kicked it behind her – then lunged, snatched it, and bolted, trying to adopt what she hoped was a giddy enough smile to convince the crew that her visit aboard had been enjoyable, if no doubt somewhat briefer than expected. Then she picked up the pace, vaulted off the side, and broke into a run up the docks, expecting to hear small-arms fire at the least, if not the cannons. But evidently the pirates could not sort themselves out long enough to realize that their captain had been robbed at gunpoint by his attractive potential bedmate, and there was no pursuit. Not that there wouldn't be any at all, but once she'd given this to Gold and gotten a bead on the pirate, it wouldn't be for long.

Extremely pleased with herself, Emma hailed a cab to Kensington Palace, and arrived as the distant bells of the city churches were calling four. But when she pulled the cord for the night butler, it was only the same brown-haired maid as before who finally answered her call, sleepy and tousled, and Emma felt obliquely bad for rousing her. "I'm sorry," she said, "but this can't wait. Is your employer here?"

"Mr. Gold has been at the Athanaeum all night. He hasn't yet returned." The maid muffled a yawn with her hand. "You may inquire after him there."

"Right," Emma said hurriedly. "I apologize for waking you, Miss – ?"

"Just Belle will suffice," the maid said, with a self-effacing smile. "And it's no matter, I had to wake soon to start about the day. Good luck, madam."

"Thank you," Emma said again, turned back to the hansom which she had told to wait, and blinked hard, focusing her gritty eyes, as they trotted past the lawns of Hyde Park, the dark bulk of the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition – closed for the night – rising among the thick trees. She touched the compass in her pocket, thinking that the first part of the job was almost done; the sooner she could collect her money and leave, the better. She was still quite sure that Gold had used her as a mole to find and sack the Night Market, and while there was no way to ask him directly about it without adding herself to the list of casualties, there had to be some method of covering her arse – or theirs, come to think of it. As eventful as the last several hours had been, she'd pushed the thought that the underworld might be permanently crippled out of her mind. She couldn't face that, not yet.

The eastern sky had turned dark grey and the stars were starting to fade by the time the hansom turned into Pall Mall, and drew to a halt at the massive marble Neoclassical edifice of the Athanaeum Club, London's most exclusive establishment for elite gentlemen. While membership was theoretically open to those who had achieved distinction in Science, or Art, or Literature, or any other intellectual accomplishment which old money and a hereditary title could not necessarily purchase, it had recently become more or less the private smoking room for the Royal Society, who controlled its membership lists, its funds, its supernumeraries, and its patrons very closely. There were certainly those in London's non-magical aristocracy who bitterly resented this takeover, all of whom were doubtless plotting their displeasure in any of the dozen other gentlemen's clubs on the Mall, but as always, it was quite difficult to squabble with the sorcerers.

Emma allowed the driver to hand her down, paid him, then went up the steps and summoned the doorkeeper, who was suitably scornful at the idea that he should be expected to admit a _woman_ onto the sacred premises, but a pointed drop of the President's name convinced him otherwise. Still grumbling, but not aloud, he showed her into the splendid columned foyer with its blown-glass aether lamps and marvelously nude Greek statues, bid her to wait, then returned to conduct her into a more intimate parlor, almost lost in a fug of cigar smoke, a fire crackling merrily in the hearth and Robert Gold sitting at his ease behind a spindly-legged mahogany table, turning something in his hand.

He glanced up as she was escorted nearer. Despite it being almost dawn, he appeared to be barely tired; she doubted he had ever gone to sleep. His pinstriped suit was immaculately pressed, his cravat sharply folded, as he took a lingering drag on his cheroot, then tapped it into a glazed saucer and snuffed it. "Miss Swan," he said. "How delightful."

The butler took his unobtrusive leave, and Emma a seat. "I have what you want."

"Do you." Gold lifted the object in his hand: a round clay orb etched with arcane, cabbalistic symbols, a pupil painted in the middle that made it look uncannily like a staring eye. "But do you know what this is, dearie?"

Emma had seen something like it once or twice in the Market, but even there, such things were not common knowledge. It was safer to feign ignorance. "No."

"Ah. Well. It was sent to me by an. . . associate, in Prague. I have eyes and ears across the Continent, you know, and Prague is one of the few places that can claim any sort of competition with London as a seat of magic. To make a long and dreary story short, he has gathered certain intelligence to suspect the existence of a plot against me. Of which this – " he held up the clay eye – "would form the chief part. Prague's magicians have a specialty in such things."

"Oh?" Emma did her best to keep her expression bland and incurious, even if a sudden foreboding had departed her skull and began to slither down her spine. She wasn't sure why exactly he was telling her this, but did have a feeling that her mission was about to become rather more complicated. He wanted her to do something, was certainly not going to let her leave his service even if she could deliver the compass to him, and then soon Killian Jones himself. And this. . . that was a golem's eye, and golems were monstrous giants made of clay and blood, huge and terribly powerful. It was said that Rabbi Judah Loew, the renowned Jewish sorcerer, had crafted the first one to guard his ghetto, sculpted it from the mud of the banks of the River Vltava. A paper, the _shem,_ was placed in the creature's mouth to bring it to life, and its master controlled it through the magical eye. Rabbi Loew had used his only defensively, to protect his people from the attacks of those who wished them ill, but the powerful and ambitious man who might be using one now clearly had no such scruples. _Does he mean to unloose it on London?_ The thought gave Emma a chill.

"Who would dare to challenge you?" she asked instead, carefully.

"An excellent question." Gold set down the golem's eye and sipped from his cup of tea. "My informant believes that it is a certain individual known as Jafar, an exiled political dissident from the Ottoman Empire. A particularly clever and troublesome man; I've crossed paths with him before, and I don't doubt he hasn't forgotten it. However, he must not have been careful enough, if he let himself be known when he was nosing about Prague in search of a golem. I fully expect to thwart him, but if I should require some assistance. . . well then, dearie, you won't be adverse to earning extra, I am sure?"

"Of course not," Emma murmured, doing her best to keep her smile stitched on. "Well, my lord. As I said, I have something for you."

"Do you?" Gold sat back and folded his hands. "Let's have it."

Emma reached into her satchel and produced the compass – somewhat battered by being dropped, but otherwise intact, and slid it across the table to him. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands, weighed it, and examined the beveled crystal face. There was a very long, very uncomfortable moment of silence. Then he put it down and said, "Do you think you're being funny, Miss Swan?"

She shifted in her chair, suddenly uncertain. "How do you mean?"

"I mean," Gold repeated, looking put out at her ignorance, "that you would have done me full as much good if you brought me the rubbish from the quay. This is a fake. Crude. Useless. Not even that convincing of a replica. What have you done with the real one – kept it for yourself, perhaps?"

"I – no!" She was horrified, even as certain events about the night were taking on a new and disturbing cast. Such as why it had been so easy to get away from the pirate ship, and why they hadn't bothered pursuing her. _He tricked me. He knew it was a fake, he let me steal it._ She _had_ been holding a gun to the captain's head at the time – she herself might have done the same if she thought she could get away with it – but she was still furious. And with that, she knew that no matter what Gold said, even if he hadn't ordered her to continue hunting down the pirate, she would. Captain Killian Jones had just made it personal.

"I," she said again. "I thought – "

"I know quite well what you _thought_. You disappoint me." Gold disdainfully dropped the compass into the salver, alongside the ashes of his cigar. "And you came _so_ highly recommended."

"I assure you, I will make this – "

"You'd best hope so, dearie. For your sake." Gold raised a hand, and Emma could feel the butler looming up at her back, clearly there to remove her – in one way or another. He gave a little shrug. "You were at the Night Market earlier this evening, I am sure. And hence you know what I do to those who cross me."


	6. Chapter 6

Blondes. Blonde women. Delightfully dangerous blonde women, blonde women with marvelous bosoms, with green eyes and porcelain skin that he would gladly explore inch by sensuous inch – not that Killian had anyone particular in mind, of course. It was more of a scientific horror at how many blonde women he might have failed to properly appreciate over the years, having always been a brunette man, himself. All the blondes who wore their golden curls in frothing tumbles down their backs, pretty and pink-cheeked as china shepherdesses, or high and sleek in a chignon, or done up with a lot of ornamented pins that were the bugger to get out in clandestine, lustful haste (not that he'd know a thing about that). Or in a braided crown, or long and loose, pale as cornsilk. Oh yes, he did like those. Pity that he only had five fingers to imagine combing through those thick, soft locks, or running across the bow of the wide, stern mouth, the indent in her chin as if God had left a thumbprint there in fashioning her (or dropping her from heaven, either way). But then she was moving above him, riding into him, she was –

Holding a gun to his head, again, and Killian sighed in aggravation at his imagination's stubborn insistence on accuracy to go and muck up a perfectly good fantasy. He felt an oblique guilt to even be picturing the blonde woman, who was clearly some sort of mercenary and very likely a catspaw of the Royal Society as well (why would she want the compass otherwise, instead of all the other treasure aboard a pirate ship, which would be of far more interest to a common thief?) instead of Milah – who, he reminded himself, was truly who he wanted and could never have again, thanks to Robert bloody Gold. Very well, that there was a wakeup call.

He still did feel slightly bad about purveying Blondine with a fake, which surprised him – but not enough to do anything about it. The real compass was safely back in Paris, of course, and Jafar had informed him that the false one had certain interesting properties (in that tone which made Killian suppose it wise not to inquire what exactly they were) and hence he should try quite hard to get it planted in the President's place of residence. So far as that went, Blondine may have made his life much easier. Even if the Night Market _was_ still in operation, she couldn't have sold it there; thanks to the bloody newspapers, everyone knew what it was and where it came from. Probably a freelancer, had the luck to run into him, recognize him, and decide to do her worst, ransom the thing back for as big a bounty as she could get. Aye, well, good for her, but Gold was not going to be pleased once he discovered the deception, and thus she might not find her reward as satisfying as she thought.

Once more, Killian had to push aside the guilt. She'd used him, betrayed him – he didn't owe her a damn thing. He'd just got done ridding himself of Scarlet, he didn't need to go acquiring another distraction in the bugger's place. Jafar would certainly not be pleased, and even Killian Jones, who feared very few men and respected even fewer, knew already not to take the prospect of his wrath lightly. But no backing out now. Not a chance.

Right then. Gold. Remembering his conjecture that he would need an extra trick or three up his sleeve before attempting burglary at Kensington Palace, Killian ruminated briefly, then was struck with the realization that it would be extremely beneficial to make a trip to Edinburgh. The Scottish Royal Society had always played second fiddle to their English counterparts, as Scotland tended to do in general, and could have no love for Robert Gold, one of their own, selling out and going south to get rich serving the Sassenachs. Besides, as a young man fresh from parochial school in Glasgow, he had arrived in Edinburgh, quickly displayed a prodigious and dazzling talent for magic, and then, after the Scots had taught him everything they knew, used their patronage to get a place reading law and practical sorcery at Oxford, and never looked back or came home again. Surely there were profitable resentments, and dirty secrets, to be excavated there.

Yes, excellent. Decision made, Killian next reckoned that it would not be at all a good idea to fly the _Roger_ up there. Apart from the fact that the old girl still needed her repairs finished, it was hard to so much as fart in British skies without the wrong sorts getting, so to speak, wind of it, and he remained leery about the narrowly failed ambush on the Thames. He was quite confident in his ability to avoid capture, but no need to extravagantly tempt fate. He had another route in mind, besides.

After sleeping a few hours and having a quick conference with his crew to apprise them of the plan, Killian got dressed, threw a few essentials into a rucksack, and set out. The nearest waypoint was in Richmond, not _too_ far away, thought he couldn't be sure how long it would take for a wagon to arrive. Hopefully not much, if he sped up the process, and once he arrived at the waypoint – a thick, tangled thorn hedge that would, and in fact did, horrify the royal gardeners of Hampton Court, but no matter how industriously they cut, snipped, sheared, and pruned, it always grew back even more exuberantly the very next day, until they finally gave up in exasperation. Once Killian was standing in its formidable shadow, he reached under his shirt, extracted the silver crucifix he always wore – the only relic he had from his mother – and whispered, _"Gralt'a, an Lucht Si_ _ú_ _il."_

For long moments, nothing. He waited tensely, peering through the thickets, not sure what he'd do if they decided that his privilege had finally been lost. The Irish Travellers were a fiercely secretive and insular lot, and though his mother had been one, Killian was never sure how long they'd feel a sense of obligation to her son. Roving nomads, rumored to be more than part faerie, they crossed the whole of the British Isles in their brightly painted wagons, following the old ley lines and emerging from hedgerows or standing stones or ancient barrows, wherever the barrier between the mundane and magical worlds was thinnest. Along the way, they made their living with small tricks, selling charms to make the cow's milk sweet or to keep ghoulies from the home, or tinsmithing, or collecting old horses for slaughter, or playing pipes and fiddles at _ceilidhs,_ and here and there a confidence-game or spot of honest pickpocketing. Killian wondered sometimes if this was where he'd gotten it, his sense of restless adventure and his talent for thievery – as well as his disdain for authority. He wished he'd known his mother, but Caitriona Jones had died giving him birth. After that, Davy was never the same again.

Killian shook his head, chasing off the memories, and was heartily relieved to hear a rustling from deep within. A moment later, a gaily painted yellow wagon emerged, driven by a wizened brown stump of humanity who eyed Killian up and down with patent skepticism, then asked in the Cant, "Aye, so then where'd you be going, me lad?"

"Edinburgh, it would happen," Killian answered in the same language. Since his mother died before she could teach it to him, he'd had to learn it from scratch, mostly in the three years between his father abandoning him and Liam finding him; he worked as a mudlark on the Thames, picking out lost trinkets and selling them to the Travellers passing through London, among other occupations. He had the crucifix and the knowledge that his mother was one of theirs, so he scraped by well enough. Never forgot it entirely during his years in the Navy, and found it quite useful once he became a pirate. "Can you take me there, _menthroh?"_

The man chewed his pipe. "So far as Derby, by route of Cornwall and Northampton."

"That'll do." Killian climbed onto the running board and braced himself; the first time he'd experienced it, his guts had attempted to turn themselves inside out through his mouth. Sure enough, the driver cracked the whip, the horse stepped forward – there was a sense of immense pressure, the world folding up like a Japanese paper swan, everything in the wrong place – and then they were rolling out of a perfect circle of elms and along a narrow Cornish lane, Tintagel Castle looming formidably on its bluff in the distance. A few years ago, when the demand for Arthuriana had reached one of its periodic fever pitches, Killian had spent plenty of time here, stealing as many of the genuine artifacts as he could get his hands on and finding ways to cleverly forge the rest; he must have sold Excalibur half a dozen times at least, at an ever more comfortable profit. The thought made him grin, wondering if the buyers had ever crossed paths at some posh London soiree. That'd be bloody awkward, no doubt about it.

That was how the rest of the day went. When the Travellers had finished their business, they drove into the elm circle in Cornwall and out past the Eleanor cross in Northampton, leaving Killian's stomach – not entirely recovered from the first go-round – dancing the polka again. While his hosts were occupied, he stopped off at a town-square tavern and got a drink, thus ensuring that he did not notice their subsequent transition to Derby quite as much. This was as far as the present drivers were going, and it took Killian close to an hour before he succeeded in flagging down a wagon headed for Scotland. At last, as a heavy, sodden dusk was falling into the steep hills of the city, the bells of Holyrood Abbey calling the evening prayers, he arrived in Edinburgh, wet and hungry and his arse damn sore from jolting on splintery wooden boards all day. In hopes of repairing these tribulations, he set off for the World's End at once. A cramped, smoky, crowded pub, the place had originally been named for its location at the foot of the Royal Mile, near the medieval city walls that did in fact mark the end of the world for the cultured city-dwellers, but it had long been rumored that there was a door in the back, never opened, that led into the Seelie Court. As well, it was sworn up and down by reputable men that the Angel Gabriel had guested here, while hunting the rogue Nephilim that Louis the Sun King, during his interminable wars with Britain, had summoned to earth. One of the chief incidents that led to the French distaste for practical magic, if Killian recalled. That and the popular tale that Marie Antoinette had employed a sorcerer to do nothing but produce cakes out of thin air.

He took a seat, and was shortly supplied with food and beverage. Haggis was both quite a bit tastier than you imagined, and the sort of hearty warm meal that was good for this cold, miserable night. As he ate, he glanced around in hopes of spotting someone useful. Scottish magicians, as plain and frugal as the rest of their countrymen, were not nearly as easily distinguished as their English fellows, who tended to go in for all sorts of ridiculous accoutrements and gaudy fashions; bunch of bloody peacocks, they were. In contrast, the Scots favored sober dark broadcloth suits and sensible cravats that made them look like bankers or clerks or very boring great-uncles whose houses smelled of boiled cabbage. No one seemed eager to pop up and announce himself as such, at any rate, and Killian finished supper, paid for a room, and edged up the creaking steps to the garret. Lay down on the narrow bed, and fell fast asleep.

The morning was barely noticeable when it arrived, being just as grey, damp, and dark as before, and Killian donned his top hat before setting out into the fog, huffing and puffing as he climbed the steep street, boots splashing in the mud. Eventually he reached the University of Edinburgh, however, and as his request to visit the Dean of the School of Magic was being processed – he posing as James MacKenzie, the father of a prospective new student – he glanced around at the plaques and tintypes on the walls, highlighting notable alumni. One of them caught his eye: damn if it wasn't Archibald Hopper, the very doctor he'd crossed paths with so eventfully, was it – just last week? But that made him wonder if a man who knew so much about magical maladies and cures might be able to procure something, if this expedition fell through. Hopper would not be pleased to see him again, but Blondine wasn't the only one who could hold guns to people's heads. Not that he was thinking about her.

The Dean, when he finally arrived, was effusive and solicitous, but not very helpful. Even when Killian slid a fat golden guinea across the table and asked if perhaps now he remembered more about Robert Gold, he remained blandly unforthcoming. "If your son were to enroll wi' us, Mr. MacKenzie, we could see about apprenticeship in the Royal Society, if the boy has a talent, but to discuss such things now. . . it would be quite irregular, d'ye ken?"

 _And perish the thought we should be bloody irregular._ Killian was wearing his false hand instead of his hook, which he now deeply regretted insofar as it lost him the opportunity to bury it between the prevaricating bastard's eyeballs. He was _not_ spending a guinea to walk out of here with nothing, and while there was always the option of the whiskey route, that would take too long. So he coaxed, cajoled, and finally openly threatened until the Dean's memory abruptly improved, and he let slip that while at school here, Robert Gold had been most interested in the legendary Persian sorceress Scheherazade, and the possibility of tracking down the artifacts and magic mentioned in her tales – whether it was the treasure of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the herb of immortality sought by Bulukiya, or the djinni of Solomon. Everyone had condescendingly considered this a vain and frivolous pursuit, and kept on doing so right up until Gold, at the tender age of eighteen, found (or so he claimed, at least) the lost City of Brass in the Sahara Desert, with its working automatons, mummy-queen, and ancient bottle, supposedly one of a set of three, that when put together would give their master complete control over the very laws of magic themselves. They could bring the dead back to life, change the past, make one fall in love with anyone they chose. Anything was possible. _Anything_.

Upon hearing this, Killian's ears pricked up sharply, remembering what Jafar had said about wanting him to steal a bottle from Gold, that Jafar himself had the other two and needed the third to complete his collection. As casually as possible, he asked whether Gold might have published or presented these findings anywhere, and was given a regretful answer that alas, young Robert had held them closely to the vest – so close, in fact, that he had not even seen fit to supply his old alma mater with a copy. He may have referenced them in his dissertation at Oxford, the dean added, in a faintly scandalized tone at the thought of such things in the hands of Anglicans, but Christ Church, one of the leading schools of magic in Europe, kept its archives sealed. _And good luck even to you getting in there,_ was the unspoken implication.

Sensing that he had got all the useful intelligence available without outright torturing the man (maybe sing "God Save the Queen" loudly and off-key, or wipe his arse with the saltire) Killian thanked him and emerged into the mist and murk, which was now expertly aiming down the back of his overcoat. He made a few other visits to proprietors he knew in the city, but while all of them sympathized heartily with his arms of taking down Gold, none of them could offer substantive assistance outside of a clap on the back and a wry, "Watch out ye don't get killed, then."

Killian, discouraged that what he'd thought was going to be an illuminating venture had turned up so many dead ends, finally decided that he would in fact stop off at Oxford and discover if anyone's conviction could be bent one way or another. So he trudged out to Arthur's Seat, the majestic green tor that overlooked the city, and the Traveller waypoint.

Two or three hours later, after a stop at what felt like every godforsaken little town between Edinburgh and the border, jerking in and out of existence like a marionette pulled by a string, Killian arrived somewhere in Yorkshire, as twilight was fast falling. Indeed, it was late enough that most everyone had stopped for the night, and after forty minutes of waiting, he was forced to realize that no more wagons were likely to come through until tomorrow. Which left him stranded, with no place to spend the night except under a bush somewhere, and he didn't like the look of the sky. It was an eerie, bruised purple, the clouds were tall black towers, and the wind whining across the moors sounded like something evil.

Turning up his collar, Killian started to walk. Distant globes of light, deceitful will-o-the-wisps, bobbed on the horizon, but otherwise there was no sign of life in any direction. There was a faint track through the bracken, which he followed, and eventually dipped down, widened into a rutted road, and entered a thick copse of hawthorn trees, their limbs black and skeletal, thrashing in the gale. Killian himself had to proceed with his head down, hand clapped to his hat as he crossed a quaint little medieval bridge and continued deeper into the forest, hearing water running somewhere nearby. It sounded deep and fast, and he hoped it wasn't the Strid, the notorious burn that was only a few feet wide and looked like a shallow brook to wade across, but was in fact untold fathoms deep, riddled with caverns and chasms; nobody who fell in ever lived to tell the tale, and often the body was never recovered. Furthermore, it was said to be haunted by a white horse, which if seen was either the omen of impending death or the cause of it. In either case, it was exactly the sort of thing you did not want to meet on the apocryphal dark and stormy night in a deserted country lane, which was presently exactly what this was. That or –

With the wind now shrieking as loudly as it was, Killian almost didn't hear it. But his instincts chirped at him, and then he threw himself aside into a pile of fallen leaves and mud, just as a big black coach, drawn by four black horses, who although not white seemed to fit the bill for portentous demonic equines nonetheless, thundered past, wheels skidding as it veered. The coachman shouted and cracked the whip and wrestled them to an eventful halt just up the road. "Oy, ya bloody dunderheid!" he bellowed, in a thick Yorkshire accent. "The hell ya were doin' in the middle of the road, now?"

Killian, after brushing himself off and recollecting what modicum of dignity he could, proceeded toward the hulking shadow of the coach. "I do apologize, sir," he said, in his own slightly drawled London accent. "Next time I'll be sure to be left of center, that would help. Or perhaps you not driving like a bat out of hell. That would help too."

The coachman glared at him, and was clearly about to fire back with whatever provincial wit he fondly imagined himself to possess, when the coach door opened. A woman's voice, dark and throaty, demanded, "Why are we stopped, Claude?"

"This bugger here, he stepped outta nowhere – "

The woman made an impatient, irritated noise, and pushed the door wider with one kid-gloved hand, so Killian could just see her by the light of the lantern swinging from the running board. Milky skin, dark eyes, red lips, luxuriant black hair swept up beneath a hat that must have been some milliner's pride and joy, rustling skirts in violet silk and black lace. Beautiful, but instantly and sharply recognizable as dangerous. "Oh?" she said, studying Killian critically. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for a place to spend the night, my lady." Killian made a flourishing bow. He could hear the first heavy raindrops starting to pound through the leaves, and in a few minutes more, this road would be turned into a sucking quagmire. "I'm only a poor lost traveler, I swear."

The woman snorted. "That's likely. Well, you're out of luck, and you'd also best be off my estate, unless you want – "

"Mother, wait." The voice came from behind her, and the coach's second occupant leaned forward – a brown-haired boy, ten or eleven, dressed in a smart school uniform. The sight of him was in fact something of a shock; while the resemblance was not instantaneous or overwhelming, he nonetheless reminded Killian of Bae, who he had taken aboard the _Roger_ not long after losing Milah and his hand. He had wanted to use him to find intelligence on his father, but ended up, of all the confounded things, caring deeply for the lad. Offered to adopt him, raise him as his own, but Bae had flung Milah's death in his face, blaming Killian for the loss of his mother, and fled somewhere into the London underworld. _God, Bae, I didn't, I never. . ._

Killian shook his head, once more having to force himself to return to the present. "Mother," the boy was saying entreatingly. "It's late, he doesn't have anywhere to go. We can take him home for just one night, can't we?"

"A strange man in the house with us, some. . . dirty vagrant? Henry, are you quite mad? We've been through this!"

"Please?" Henry pleaded. "I won't say anything about. . . it, I promise!"

"And I have also told you many times that you are simply inventing it, there's nothing there. I shall have to send you to an asylum if you keep this up. Is that what you want? Is it?"

The boy – Henry – shrank. "No, Mother. It's not."

"That's my good lad." The woman smiled tenderly at him, then reached to close the coach door – only to find that she couldn't. Whether it was the boy's haunting evocation of Baelfire, or because he didn't want to walk on this road in the storm, or because something struck him as odd about this whole situation, Killian had a firm grip on the handle, and would not let go no matter how much she tugged. Then with a charming smile, he swung himself up and into the coach, seating himself on the green crushed-velvet bench across from them.

"There," he said, with another smile for Henry. "Thank you very much for the generous offer, young master."

Henry looked delighted; his mother, furious. But after she gave Killian the once-over, she evidently saw something that made her change her mind, and flashed him a sleek, predatory smile. "Ah, of course," she said. "It would be quite discourteous to leave you out in the rain. Very well. Claude – " called out the door to the coachman – "let's get on home, please."

Claude, doubtless after a boggled moment that they were actually picking up this tramp, did as ordered, and the woman shut the door as the coach jolted and swayed into motion. "Well?" she asked curtly. "Your name?"

"Liam."

"Liam. . .?"

"Surely that will suffice, my lady?"

She snorted again, but for the moment, chose to let it pass. "I am Lady Regina, mistress of Applewood Hall. This is my son, Henry."

Henry solemnly stuck out his hand for a shake, which Killian administered with gentlemanly precision, biting his cheek. It struck him that the boy was desperate for companionship – a feeling he himself was close kin to, and since it cost him nothing and might unearth something of interest, he was kind. "So you'll be in the grammar school here, lad? What are your favorite subjects? Going to make a magician like your mum?"

Lady Regina shot him a very sharp look, and Killian supposed that perhaps he should have been more careful with the fact that he could tell – in his line of work, he'd had to learn to spot them at one glance, or end up dead. Or perhaps he shouldn't. It was a veiled threat that she was not going to be able to do as she liked with him, for whatever reasons had led her to permit him aboard. It had not escaped him that her occupation – vanishingly rare for aristocratic women, as the men in power were not at all keen to teach them anything that could lead to them getting _Ideas –_ might be useful in finding something that his venture to Edinburgh had denied him, and he did not intend to be dislodged until he did so. Hence he leaned back, smugly ignoring Lady Regina's glares of disapproval, as Henry happily chattered away about school – he liked History and English, loathed Latin and Mathematics, thought he might want to be a magician but wished he was a knight more, loved the tales of King Arthur and the Round Table. This provided Killian an excellent opportunity to tell him all about the articles he had recovered from Tintagel, Glastonbury, and Avalon, and by the time the coach had turned through a pair of imposing wrought-iron gates, lumbering up the long dark drive to the manor perched regally at the crest of the hill, Henry had plainly decided that they were the best of friends. _Has he no others? Where is his father?_ Despite himself, Killian could not help but feeling vaguely miffed on the boy's behalf. Not that he was going to do anything stupid about it, of course.

The coach rumbled under the Grecian-columned portico, and the footman stepped down to hand Lady Regina out. Before he could do likewise for Henry, however, Killian swung out first and lifted the boy in his arms, as Henry giggled in delight. As the rain pounded down, dimly visible in eerie grey sheets just outside the lantern light, the three of them ascended the broad stone steps as the footman held open the door, and Claude the coachman drove away to unhitch and put up the horses. Wondering what he was about to find, Killian stepped inside.

It was a spacious, sumptuously furnished country estate, with half-timbered Tudor walls, plaster frescoes, dark mahogany wainscoting, blown-glass lamps, claw-footed chairs and chaises upholstered in striped silk, a grand staircase that led away into the gloom of upstairs, and framed oil portraits and rich tapestries hung on the walls. Another servant took their wet wraps, said, "We've kept supper hot, m'lady," and bowed them through into the dining room at the back, places set for two. On seeing Killian, they hastened to add a third, at which Lady Regina's nostrils flared but she made no comment. So they sat and were served, the adults taking wine and Henry given cider, and for several minutes there was nothing but the well-mannered clink of silver, china, and crystal. Then Henry gulped his mouthful of veal and said to Killian, "Would you like to see my drawings?"

"Henry!" His mother scowled. "You're not to go excusing yourself in the middle of supper to fetch those filthy papers down here."

"I'd love to see them, lad," Killian assured him. "After dinner, though. Wouldn't want to get you in trouble."

Once the meal was finished, therefore, and they had retired to the drawing room, Henry bolted off before Lady Regina could object, and scuttled back with a sheath of smudged charcoal sketches, all of which he eagerly spread out for Killian's approval. It gave him a pang; Milah had liked to draw too, but he thumbed through them. They appeared to be some sort of whimsical pieces, from his books of fairytales perhaps: a princess in a glass coffin, a prince on a horse, a girl in a red hood, and an imperious evil queen with a magic mirror, who looked rather markedly like Lady Regina. "These are lovely, lad," Killian said diplomatically; nobody was going to put them in the Louvre any time soon, but he _was_ only eleven. "Where'd you get the ideas?"

"I. . ." Henry shifted. Apparently feeling his mother's dark gaze boring into the back of his head, he said weakly, "I made them all up. None of it's real, obviously."

Lady Regina eyed them a moment longer, then abruptly got to her feet. "Pardon me, please. I have to go see to something. Thank you." And with that, though neither of the boys had actually said anything, she swept out.

As soon as he was quite sure she was gone, Killian cocked an eyebrow. "So your mum. . .. she's a piece of work, isn't she?"

"She. . . she's not actually my real mother." Henry twisted his hands in his lap. "My real mother was young and in prison when she had me, so she found Lady Regina to raise me. But Emma – that's my real mother – pays her a lot every month to do it, and this is where the money goes. Making the house look nice. Sometimes I feel like. . ." His voice dropped, became small. "Sometimes I feel like I don't matter very much."

"I'm sure she loves you, lad," Killian said automatically, even though he himself had drawn something of the same conclusions. "What does your real mum do, then, that brings in so much money? And if so, why can't she just bring you home with her?"

Henry flushed. "She – can't. She's a. . . a bounty hunter, in London. She says that she runs in dangerous circles, she's gone all the time, she wouldn't be able to take care of me or ensure my safety. She visits usually on my Easter holidays, but I don't think that even if she wanted to, she could get me out of here. Once I climbed through the bedroom window to escape, but the trees came to life and wrapped me up in their branches and. . ."

"Does she hurt you?" Killian asked, with academic interest. "Lady Regina?"

"No!" Henry looked startled. "I have everything I want. She just. . . won't let me go. And ever since the drawings, she's been telling everyone that I'm crazy, but I. . . I'm not."

"Ah." Killian glanced them over with renewed interest. "What are they, then?"

"They're real," Henry said in a rush. "They're all real. Mother has a vault, it's where she's keeping them. They're all asleep, somehow. Except Ruby – " he nodded at the girl in the red cloak – "she must have escaped, because she's not there anymore. But it's dangerous, because she doesn't know who she is. None of them do. And I think. . ." He lowered his voice and shifted closer, speaking low and rapidly. "I think my real mother, Emma, she's the one that can break the spell and wake them all up and set them free. But I don't think Mother knows – she can't, or she would have done something by now. So I want Emma to come visit, but I'm scared every time that Mother will work out who she is, and. . ."

"Ah." While indeed a fantastical tale, it was far from the strangest thing Killian had ever heard, and combined with his own observations that Lady Regina was both magical and dangerous, he saw no immediate reason why it shouldn't be true. "So this mother of yours, lad. I'm in London quite often, know a good few sorts in the underworld. What's she look like, where can I find her? Maybe I can pass a message to her." It always paid to periodically grease palms with useful intelligence, as it might save his skin one day, and increase his chances of getting the same in return. The whole affair with Jafar had come about as the result of one such transaction.

"Her name's Emma, like I said." Henry looked at him gratefully. "Emma Swan. She's blonde and has green eyes, she's tough and doesn't take nonsense. She doesn't tell me much about her work, she says it's to protect me, but she hunts down people that other people want. Mostly in London. At least I think so."

At that, Killian felt a bolt of lightning go down his spine. It was not necessarily the case, there could be others corresponding to the description, but it made him think instantly and completely of Blondine. _Emma Swan, is it?_ Would that, by chance, be the same as the Black Swan, a hunter that most of the underworld knew about by reputation, and did not want to cross paths with, despite her being a woman. He had always thought that quite silly himself, as some of the strongest and bravest and smartest people he had ever known were women. He genuinely liked them for more than just the obvious, and saw no reason to degrade or qualify the Black Swan's skills based on her sex. Especially if she was who he now thought she was. _She bested me, and that never bloody happens._

Henry, seeing the look on his face, opened his mouth to ask another question, but at that precise moment Lady Regina returned, and they both shut up like clams. "It's rather late, Henry," she said, gazing pointedly at the stately grandfather clock. "Shouldn't you be getting onto bed?"

"Yes, Mother," Henry said with a sigh, getting to his feet, dutifully pecking the powdered cheek she presented, and then, with one more lingering glance at Killian, excused himself. Lady Regina waited until his footsteps had faded, then took a bottle and two small crystal goblets from the cupboard, poured them each an aperitif, handed Killian's to him, then seated herself on the davenport. There they sat, sipping daintily and staring at each other, until she finally spoke.

"Well," she said, all but the barest traces of courtesy gone from her voice. "What are you doing here, Captain?"

Killian was startled that she knew who he was, and likely had known it all along, but then, they were both testing each other, taking each other out at the knees, and she _was_ a sorceress, he should have seen it coming. "Returning from Edinburgh, my lady," he said smoothly. "I was stranded here at nightfall, and then nearly run over by your coach. I'm sure you recall."

Lady Regina pursed her lips. "So what were you doing in Edinburgh?"

"I'm none so sure that's your business." He smirked at her.

"And I rather think it is, seeing as no one knows you're here." She made a small motion with her hand, barely perceptible, that nonetheless conveyed a tangible menace. "And it would be sad for Henry. He seems to have become quite fond of you."

 _Aye, indeed, if it's true what he's telling me._ It struck Killian that he could always play nice, give her what she wanted, then steal Henry away – the boy would be thrilled – and hold him hostage for advantage from both his mothers. Yet the thought filled him with a certain distaste, and he was likely to end up as one of her enchanted, eternally sleeping captives down in her vault if he did. So he said, "Looking for a way to hurt Gold, of course."

She couldn't quite disguise her expression: recognition, revulsion, rage, revelation, more or less in that order. "Gold? _Robert_ Gold?"

"Aye, who else. Why? You know him?"

"Oh yes," Regina snapped. "He was the one who taught me magic, claimed I was one of the most gifted students he'd ever had – then one day, said that I was a woman and would never be in the Royal Society or Parliament and therefore of no imaginable use to him, and he preferred not to waste his time on me any longer. So he threw me out, but I was determined to finish. I applied to both Oxford and Cambridge, and got letters back patronizingly enquiring whether I was quite clear on the fact that they did not admit 'girls and young Ladies' – even though I had presented samples of my practical work and theoretical essays that would have placed me top of the Norrington Table. So I had to study bit by bit, stealing books, doing experiments, fishing a copy of an old Society exam out of the rubbish tip and taking it for myself. So yes. Yes, I know Robert bloody Gold."

Killian raised an eyebrow; it was clear that not only did she do so, her grudge against him had not subsided with time either. _Excellent._ Seeing that this might prove fruitful, he prodded further, bit by bit revealing more of his own errand, until he finally asked straight out, "So, do you think you could get me into Kensington Palace?"

Regina considered him over the rim of her glass. "Maybe."

"I'd be quite sure to pay you well."

"Money?" She scoffed. "I have plenty of that. No, Captain, all I will require in return is your promise not to interfere with the affairs of myself and my son, ever again. It's unkind, you know. Telling him all these fanciful tales, distracting him from his studies. I would hate for him to get attached to you – you see the sense in that, surely? And he can be a. . . disturbed child. I don't want him set off."

 _Aye, one of you is disturbed, and it bloody well isn't the lad._ But Killian was years past requiring any sort of morality or standards in his business partners. Another voice in his head reminded him that considering his indenture to Jafar, he should be careful of getting into bed with another dangerous magician so soon – but this was a chance, and he had to take it, for Milah's sake, for Liam's, the only people he truly loved. "Of course I promise."

Regina eyed him a moment longer, then smiled. "Very good. I'm glad to see you are in fact a sensible man – all the stories about you, one can never be sure. I shall require a fortnight to do some research and determine what the best method would be, and shall be in contact with you when I have worked it out. In the meantime, you should return to London however you left it – which would be what, by the way?"

"Oh, I know a few things." He was not about to let her in on the Traveller network. "Though if that should fail, you have a way as well, surely?"

"I have an old wardrobe in the back of the house," Regina said, "but it's not always reliable – the last time someone went in, they came out babbling of a world where animals talked and lampposts grew like trees, and were shocked that only a few hours had passed, rather than the months they thought it should have been. You'll do better with yours, Captain."

 _Or she doesn't want me seeing more of her secrets._ Nonetheless, Killian gracefully acquiesced, and requested that since his way would not be operable until the morning, that she would do the small kindness of putting him up for the night. Once more, Regina looked suspicious, but finally consented to summon a servant who showed him into the dim and gloomy upstairs (Killian could not but suspect mad women shut in attics, such as in that novel _Jane Eyre,_ by Currer Bell) and to a room that he half expected to have pickled human heads floating in jars. But there was neither, and it was in fact perfectly suitable, if somewhat cold and musty. Keeping his hook and pistol well in reach, he crawled under the heavy counterpane and fell asleep.

The rain and wind had more or less stopped when he awoke, though the look of the sky promised a dramatic resumption at any moment, and he did not care to waste time. So he bid a pointedly cordial farewell to the lady of the house, and then Henry wanted, of all the silly but oddly sweet things, to give him a hug. So Killian swept the boy off his feet and gave him a proper one (just to annoy Regina, that was it) and had to inform himself yet again that he was an idiot when he found himself reluctant to put him down. To disguise it, he gave Henry's hair a careless ruffle, remarked to Regina that they were sure to be in touch, and made his departure.

The road was badly washed out, swimming in mud, and it took Killian well over an unpleasant hour to arrive back at the Traveller waypoint. But at last he did, secured passage so far as Norfolk, and from there made his way back to London, arriving in the late afternoon. He was just attempting to think of a suitable place to find some supper, or perhaps whether the Night Market had sprung back into existence, when he passed a newsie hawking the evening _Times,_ and stopped dead in his tracks.

His erstwhile associate's face stared at him, under a headline proclaiming that the fiend of the Exhibition had been captured, and would soon face the justice he deserved. Having bought the paper and skimmed it, Killian further learned that Archibald Hopper, a noted physician on Harley Street, had been taken in as well, for questioning on suspected subversive activities. Someone must have seen one or both of them after he'd left the place, put pieces together, and reported it to the Metropolitan, who swooped in and struck gold. And that left Killian with an increasingly horrible realization.

 _Bloody hell. I'm going to have to get him out of there, aren't I?_ A prisoner of Will Scarlet's importance would be held in the Tower, where they'd likely thrown Hopper as well, and trying to break in was the only thing more foolish than trying to break out. But he had to. Not out of any personal concern for Scarlet's fate, but because otherwise the bugger would start singing like a canary the instant he realized his position. If he provided intelligence that led the Empire to capturing its most hated enemy, Captain Hook, he himself would be granted clemency in return, and thus could save himself from the gallows at Tyburn by telling them everything he knew. And he'd have every reason to do it, seeing as Killian had blithely left him behind with nary a backwards glance; he couldn't feel any especial loyalty to the pirates anymore. He might hold out for a while just for the principle of the thing, but he'd choose his moment for maximum impact. And then the jig was bloody well up.

Killian groaned to himself, with feeling. He patently did not want to further fritter his time away by breaking Will sodding Scarlet out of jail, especially the damned _Tower,_ but he had no other choice if he planned on living long enough to do anything else. He'd have to make a discreet excursion to Hopper's office, see if he could deduce who exactly had taken them and by what method, how much of a struggle there had been, if anything useful had been left behind, and so forth. Therefore, still mumbling, he set off.

It was full dark by the time he arrived on Harley Street, but as he bent to pick the lock – with the utmost caution in case the Met had set up a trap in hopes of this very event – he discovered to his disquiet that it was already picked, and quite deftly too. For a moment he hesitated, thinking it might be advisable to make a judicious retreat, but to hell with it. He was Captain Hook, he'd once (literally) single-handedly taken on six men and beat them all, and he was in a fucking hurry. So, reaching for the hilt of his sword just in case, he advanced into the dark foyer, and crept toward Archie's office –

Whereupon, in a certain neat irony considering that he himself had done this to the good doctor last time, he walked directly into the barrel of a gun.

" _You."_ At the sound of the voice, he experienced a further shock; slap his arse and paint him purple if it wasn't bloody Blondine – or that was, he had a very strong feeling, Emma Swan. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"That any way to greet me, darling?" He strove for casual mockery. "Always pointing things in my face? If you want me to point something back at you, you need only ask."

Emma was not amused. "You think you're quite something, don't you? Well, I've met thousands of men like you, and let me inform you: you're not. After you gave me the fake compass, you must have – "

"Ah. That. That was. . . regrettable." He gagged as she twisted the barrel of the gun into his throat nearly hard enough to core his Adam's apple. "Easy there, easy. You might damage my face, or something else you'd miss."

She growled, but consented to ease the pressure a bare fraction. "I want an answer. Why are you here?"

"For you to take your frustrations out on, of course. Why are you?"

She hesitated, and in that moment, it hit him that it was for the exact same reason he was. "Hopper," he said, with complete certainty. "He informs for you, doesn't he? Or does some other sort of work, but either way, you'd rather not have him and what he knows in the hands of Her Majesty's Government. Or you think they might kill him, and that would be inconvenient."

"Maybe," Emma whispered savagely. "But you're _my_ prisoner now. And what exactly is stopping me from shooting you and leaving you here, then getting you taken off with him?"

The retort flashed to Killian's lips before he could think better of it. "Because if you do, you'll never know what I know about your son."

She went white to the lips. _"What?"_

"Your son. Henry? Charming boy, about eleven? Lives in Yorkshire with a rather terrifying beldam, Lady Regina? Any of that sound familiar?"

"How do you know about that?" Her green eyes flashed like a lioness. "I swear, if you touched him, if you laid a _finger_ on him – "

"Relax, lass. I didn't do a thing to him. Found him rather winsome, really. All fortuitously coincidental, our meeting. But you'll not want to kill me, if you have an interest in what I learned. Then maybe we can discuss our interest in retrieving our. . . mutual friends, eh?"

Emma's eyes continued to burn at him. He had the distinct sense that if she had her druthers, she would put a bullet through his head and not lose a wink of sleep tonight, but she was too trapped by his mention of Henry to take the risk. She surveyed him up and down, and then at long last, took the gun away and holstered it with an ominous clunk.

"Fine," she said, in a low, hard voice. "Talk."


	7. Chapter 7

There were any number of places Emma Swan had expected to pass her evening, after her emancipation from the Athanaeum Club that morning with an ultimatum: find Captain Killian Jones, or at least some useful relic of him, by Michaelmas (three days away) or else be put in considerable and considerably unpleasant straits. Somehow she had not imagined any of them as the drawing room of Dr. Hopper's empty house, sitting across from her nemesis while they enjoyed a deceptively cordial glass of sherry, both of their pistols within easy reach on the side tables and the flickering gaslights casting shadows. Emma was pushing her feet against the floor to avoid sliding off the slippery mohair settle, as she had no intention of performing such an undignified maneuver in front of him, but it was difficult to concentrate both on not falling off the couch and maintaining the proper demeanor of forbidding, aloof reserve. She wished she'd had the presence of mind to take the brocaded armchair, but he, apparently two steps ahead of her again, had claimed it first. _Son of a bitch._ But until she found out what he was hiding about Henry, and Archie's arrest, she wasn't letting him walk out of here.

"So," she said at last, when she judged he might have downed enough sherry to become conversational. "What do you know about my – my son?"

The pirate shrugged. "As I said, not a great deal. Lives in Yorkshire, with a rather – assertive, shall we say? – and most aristocratic Lady Regina. Goes to school there, enjoys History and English. And has a great deal of drawings depicting certain people, who he says are all asleep, enchanted, in a certain vault. And moreover, that you're the one who can wake them up."

"Very funny."

"I'm not joking, love."

"Then you'd better hope the real story is even more ridiculous, because I am _no_ savior of any sort, believe me." She leaned back again, uncomfortably aware that this position, while helpful for keeping her on the couch, thrust her bosom out for his clearly appreciative gaze, and she angrily switched her cloak over it. "How did you find out he was my son?"

"He mentioned his real mother was a blonde-haired bounty hunter in London, and I, having encountered someone of similar description on rather _intimate_ terms quite recently – " he smirked at her again – "put two and two together."

"Why were you in Yorkshire?"

"None of your sodding business, darling." He kept grinning. "Unless you're feeling up to telling me on whose behalf you held a gun to my head, upon our last acquaintance?"

Emma cast a significant glance at the weapon in question, as if to suggest that she could very easily do so again if he failed to be cooperative. But he shifted with her, mirroring her position, legs spread in a distracting fashion as his good hand drifted to his own revolver. Both of them were instants from picking them up and pointing them at each other, at which the gilded wallpaper in the drawing room would certainly suffer damage, even if their persons did not. Loathingly, she made herself pull back, and he did the same, still matching her inch for inch, as if they were even breathing in time. It was strange and unwelcome to encounter such an unexpected synergy with the outlaw she'd been sent to track and capture. Out of nowhere she found herself wondering if Henry had liked him, but that was a ludicrously unhelpful speculation. She didn't want Killian _(Hook!)_ anywhere near him.

"Well," Jones said, when the silence had stretched to breaking. "While it is not at all to my liking, I regrettably have to spring my accomplice, Will Scarlet, from the Royal Society's grasp. And unless I much miss my guess, you'd prefer to get Archibald Hopper out of there as well. It would be quite complicated for you if you didn't, as well as a detriment to your future work. So, darling, what say we put aside our differences, just long enough? The two of us ought to be able to work out a plan, though it would be useful if we had some tools. What happened to the Night Market?"

Emma shifted uncomfortably. "It was. . . ambushed. A. . . few nights ago." She'd almost said _the night we met,_ and that would have given him ideas, of which he seemed to have too many anyway. "I think the Royal Society had a mole, or. . got access somehow, and they stormed the place, burned the stalls and took whatever they could get their hands on. I don't know how many people escaped. I was lucky."

He gave her a sharp look. "You were _there?"_

"Yes," Emma said, unsettled by the expression on his face – almost as if he felt a certain proprietary concern for her well-being, which obviously couldn't be further from the truth. He was trying to put her off her guard again, and _that_ wasn't happening. "I got out and made my way to the White Rabbit, where I. . . crossed paths with you."

"And a very enjoyable crossing it was, love, at least until the gun showed up." He shrugged. "Well, that is troublesome news and no mistake. The Royal Society's been trying for years to get their mitts on the Night Market. How could they do it now? Is a member of the underworld working for them? I could imagine that if that was so, and the dispossessed discovered their identity, that person would be in a great deal of danger."

"I don't know who." Emma managed to keep her face straight and cool.

He shrugged again. "Pity. Whoever it was might want protection. Which I can offer, of a sort."

 _Does he suspect me?_ It was impossible to say. Even worse, she was not entirely sure that she could discard his offer out of hand. She already had a distinct feeling that protecting her from the underworld would be the last thing on Gold's mind; he would find it very amusing to have her complete her work for him and then throw her to the (possibly literal) wolves, knowing that they would tear her apart on their own and spare him the trouble of dirtying his hands with it. _No. I am not making deals with the Empire's most wanted criminal._ Even if she had to push away the distressing feeling that she was already in too deep with no way out. Even if he was right, she _did_ have to get Archie out of the Tower or wherever they'd sent him, and her only current way of doing that was sitting across from her, legs still sprawled apart. _What are the odds that I could just go in there and ask politely?_ She had no interest in getting Will Scarlet out. Only –

"Oh, and," said Killian Jones, who was apparently reading her thoughts with distressing ease. "Scarlet. I have a hunch that you may have come across him hiding here, since Hopper is an informant of yours. In which case, surely you realize that he is in the unique position of being able to turn _both_ of us into the Royal Society. And surely you wish to escape their attention. . . unless, say, _you_ were the one working for them, the one that all the London underworld would like to get their hands on?" His eyes gleamed at her. Either he knew for certain, or was bluffing to try and trick her into revealing herself, and damn him, it was almost working. "Wonder who'd pay well to know that?"

Emma's hand clenched around her glass of sherry. "The last time I saw Will Scarlet," she said coolly, "I did not get the impression he would be delighted to see you again. From what I gathered, you betrayed him for your personal benefit, exactly what I'd expect from someone like you."

She thought the pirate might have flinched. A moment later, however, he was in command of himself as usual. "The affairs of myself and my crew are none of your concern, darling, though I'm sure you've had such an impeccable life as to feel comfortable passing judgment on mine. But leaving Scarlet behind was a matter of business, as getting him out will be. And hence, I assure you – "

"And what? You're just going to let him go on his merry way again?" Emma gave Hook a malicious little smile. "I can assure _you_ that he doesn't see it as a matter of business. Seemed to take it rather personally. That was why he was so eager to tell me what he knew."

 _That_ got his attention, she was pleased to see. All at once, he was leaning forward, on the edge of his seat, the teasing and taunting on his face replaced by a dark, angry intensity. _"What did he bloody tell you?"_

"Me to know. You to find out." Emma shrugged. She was pleased that she had finally been able to pull one over on him, as he had seemed disconcertingly far ahead of her to date, and she wasn't used to being outwitted. Didn't like it, either. "At any rate, this isn't negotiable. I'm turning you in, and then I don't have to worry about anything you're going to do, to me _or_ my son."

"And how'd that work out for you last time, lass?" His hand flitted casually back toward his gun, and his hook, resting on the side table, oh-so-accidentally gouged a deep slash into Archie's prized teakwood. "You think they're going to let Hopper go? _Or_ you?"

"Yes," Emma said stubbornly.

"Come on, love. You know them better than that."

"I am _not_ risking my future – my _son's_ future – to break into the damn Tower of London and get out a pair of – a pair of – " Emma floundered. Aggravating as it was, Jones had a point that she didn't want to condemn Archie to die for her, and he did know more than enough to throw a permanent wrench into her future work if he disclosed it (as he could not be blamed for doing, if the alternative was torture). Nor did she truly think the Royal Society was going to let him go. But that also meant springing Will Scarlet as well, and collaborating with Jones, and risking Gold's wrath to an even more infernal degree –

She sat motionless for a long moment, irresolute. Her loyalty was to the underworld, or what remained of it, even if it wasn't likely to return the favor. She'd had less savory bedfellows than this, plenty of them. There had to be a way to get Archie out, then alert the authorities about Jones and Scarlet's whereabouts. And even if she felt a certain amount of guilt at turning in some of her own crowd to _them_. . . even though either way, she was going to walk out of this with the undying enmity of either the Royal Society or the underworld. . .

"Fine," Emma spat. "It's a bargain."

The pirate raised a dark eyebrow. "Splendid."

* * *

The first order of business was for Emma to cross the living room, roll up the silver grate, calculate furiously as to whether the full moon was sufficiently passed that this was only moderately insane and not full-on suicide, and ignore Jones' questions as they traipsed down the dark stairs into the cellar. She held a lantern in front of her, not willing to admit that she was grateful for his solid presence at her back, as they took the twists and turns and finally stepped out into the priest's hole. "Ruby?" she whispered. "Ruby? Are you there?"

"Ruby?" Jones frowned. "Who does that – "

He was cut off as a pair of yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness just beyond the circle of lantern light, and the child of the moon, looking distinctly worse for wear, stepped into it – in her human form at least, thank heavens for small mercies. She looked at them questioningly, but didn't get time to say anything before Jones shifted his weight, fast as a snake, and shoved Emma behind him, reaching for his sword. "Bloody hell, that's a werewolf!"

"I _know,_ you cretin," Emma snapped, annoyed by his instinctive protectiveness – and not willing to admit, surprised and furtherly taken aback as well. This one was dangerous, and not just for being the Empire's most wanted criminal. "That's step one of our plan. You know the Royal Society and the Met have werewolves. Ruby – if she agrees – is going to help us with that."

"Emma?" Ruby shivered, pulling her tattered cloak tighter. "Where's Dr. Hopper? I heard shouting above, people in the house – I would have come up, but the grate – "

"It's all right." Emma did her best to sound reassuring. "He's just. . . been detained. We could use your assistance at getting him out."

The young woman looked nervous, but not terrified. "What do I have to do?"

"We're going to the. . ." Emma paused, but it would not make the prospect any less daunting. "The Tower. I'm a bounty hunter bringing in a pair of prisoners for the Royal Society. That will be you two. Then I'll cause a distraction, and in the chaos, you'll get loose. Ruby, if you can turn into a wolf, that would be useful. Captain, you find your accomplice and Archie, and break them out. Then, as I assume you have plenty of practice doing, get out of there."

"And what?" Jones asked, frowning. "Leave you behind?"

"You're a pirate, I thought that was in the Code. If we get separated, I'll meet you by the St. Paul's tunnel. You too, Ruby. Got it?"

Emma glanced around at her troops, wondering how on earth she had ended up in apparent command of this mission, but feeling better now that she had committed herself to it. And if Jones _didn't_ get out, so much more useful for her. It wasn't a thing to her, not in the least, if he should march into the Society's grip and finally not be clever enough to walk free.

Not in the least. Besides, they were wasting time.

"Come on," Emma said, taking a deep, steadying breath. "Let's get this over with."

* * *

An hour and sundry later, as the gibbous moon was paving pearlescent silver over the dark spires of London, then and odd vanishing among the clouds like a drowned king's banners, she was poling a skiff toward the black, spectral teeth of the Traitor's Gate that rose from the River Thames, the entrance by which so many, famed and obscure alike, had gone through and never returned. They would have to take extreme care, not only for breaking _into_ the Empire's most feared prison, but because the ravens of the Tower grounds, the ones who must be there in perpetuity or else the kingdom would fall, were well-known as spies and lookouts, and any of them, seeing something at the wrong time, could blow the whole flimsy plan to hell. Her heart was beating hard in her chest as she delicately maneuvered in the silty shallows, Jones and Ruby cloaked and huddled in the front of the boat with their hands tied just tightly enough for show. Then, when she was sure it wouldn't shake, she raised her voice. "Ho!"

The light on the gate flared, and a pair of Yeomen Warders leaned over. "Who bides?"

"The Black Swan. The Royal Society is expecting me. I have who they're looking for."

The Beefeaters exchanged a confused glance, as if thinking that ordinarily prisoners would be registered at some other location and _then_ transported to durance vile in the Tower, but apparently Gold had been considerate enough to notify them that he had someone on the trail of Killian Jones, and in which case, the trial and any other legal niceties could safely be assumed suspended. There was a murmur of talk, while Emma waited tensely, and then at last, the gate began to creak and rumble open. She poled forward as confidently as she could, docked the boat, then reached out to grab the pirate and the wolf girl by the wrists, jerking them out. "Let's get moving. This is the end of the line, you bastards!"

She thought she heard Jones make some comment under his breath; she was grateful not to know what. The Beefeaters were hurrying down to meet them, and then, just as Emma was wondering if she should feign a swoon or if that was altogether too obvious, Jones ripped at the rope like a chained lion, kicking her backwards hard enough that she lost her grasp, stumbled down the steps, and almost pitched headlong into the dark river. Then he threw the rope as Ruby ducked beneath it, and then as Emma was shouting at them in perfectly real panic and drawing her gun, they exploded in opposite directions. Jones veered away from the oncoming guards and toward the White Tower, the one built by William the Conqueror that lay directly in the center of the walls and grounds. Ruby ran still faster, and Emma saw her shadow stretching out, twisting, distorting. The next instant, a mammoth grey wolf hit the ground, snarling, and the Beefeaters shouted in horror, unslinging muskets and blunderbusses. Emma threw herself flat, rolling. _That proved how smart I was to trust him_. Though why the pirate would wait until they were _inside_ the Tower to try a great escape, rather than the instant they stepped out of Archie's office –

She sprang to her feet and fired a shot wide over the wolf's head, thinking they had better be careful. The City of London's entire gunpowder stocks were stored here, as well as a significant quantity of aether, and if that went up, the Great Fire of 1666 would look like a pleasant little hearthside roast in comparison. It was generally presumed that Popish agents from the Vatican had set that blaze; for all the Church fulminated against the use of magic, it was said that no one had ever met a sorcerer from the Opus Dei and lived to tell the tale. The Holy Grail and the Templars' fortune were just a few of the treasures rumored to be kept in their archives, the Philosopher's Stone itself, all manner of the weird and wild and arcane. But Emma's concern was not with historical miscellanea so much as it was with not getting them all (or at least her) blown to possibly literal kingdom come before the night was over. She reached for her other pistol and fired an equally wide shot at Jones – felt a brief fear that she'd actually hit him and was horrendously vexed with herself – as the Beefeaters scattered, bellowing in righteous pursuit. In the total melee, nobody had the least thought to spare for Emma.

 _I could get out of here. Now._ Though she should stay long enough to put in at least a cursory effort at recapturing the escapees, otherwise it would look exceedingly suspicious indeed. Or find where Archie was, or anything whatsoever. So she hitched up her muddy skirts and waded in, checking her available weaponry. The last thing she wanted was to be caught in the middle of this with an empty gun, even if it could still be employed with moderate effectiveness to hit someone over the head. Just long enough. Not much. Just long enough, and then she was gone.

* * *

Will Scarlet was stuck in a small dark hellhole – by smell, shape, and general malodorous air, he was of the professional opinion that it used to be a privy – and had been for what was, by anyone's estimation, far too bloody long. He could keep distant track of time by the bells that sounded to change the watches, but he hadn't seen a scrap of daylight, so it was impossible to tell if they were for the night or morning rounds. He was chained so he could neither sit nor stand comfortably, and he'd had nothing to eat but a few scraps of moldy bread since they'd chucked him in here, rude as you please. At first he had amused himself by mentally composing outraged letters to the Editor of the _Times,_ complaining about the barbaric and primitive customs of Her Majesty's modern Empire, but even that quickly lost its savor. He knew how the bastards worked. They'd keep him in here another week or so until he turned into a nutter, then haul him out in the full sun, see if he might be interested in talking, and make it worse than solitude and starvation if he refused. Not that he was going to. Had no intention of bein' a bloody martyr, nor taking Jones' well-deserved fall.

Will shifted his position with an aggravated sigh, thinking bitterly that he really should have booked out of Hopper's house the instant the captain had left him there. Even if Elizabeth Turner's company had been most diverting, someone must have seen or worked out that he was hiding there – one of the doctor's patients, perhaps – and promptly hastened to do their patriotic duty, culminating in far too many peelers for anybody's good breaking down the attic door and dragging him down the steps to the paddy-wagon. After the tersest of all imaginable preliminaries, confirming that he was indeed the one they were looking for, they had transported him here and inserted him into his current predicament. Bit of a bugger as predicaments went, really. He'd thought of shouting for the Beefeaters until they got off their arses and came to investigate the noise, but the walls were a foot thick, and his best efforts only made him hoarse. With only a piddling amount of brackish river water to drink, this was unwise.

Just now, however, he was decidedly convinced that he was hearing things. Not the sort of barmy things he would be hearing (and doubtless seeing) after a while in solitary, but something faint and faraway. It wasn't nearly clear enough to figure any sort of theory about what might be going on, but it did not sound like business as usual. That there, he was almost bloody positive that had been a gunshot, and he tensed, gathering his haunches under him, swearing under his breath as he wrestled with the chains. He couldn't think of what damn fool would be stupid enough to start a ruckus in the Tower grounds themselves, apart from perhaps himself, and with himself shut up here, that rather limited the options. He grunted, yanking and pulling, but only succeeded in getting himself trussed up like an idiot. He was practically dangling upside-bloody-down, wondering how on earth he was going to top this next time (assuming there _was_ a next time) when he heard rattling and chinking at the door of his cell.

 _Bloody hell._ Were they coming to interrogate him _now?_ He might not mind getting it over with, but he was dangling here with his arse in the air and there was a certain dignity he'd like to march in with, which did not quite qualify in the present situation. He kicked, managing only to turn himself furtherly vertical, as the latch continued to squeak. It didn't sound exactly like a key. As if whoever was trying to get in did not have one. Which might lead to the insane but still potential conclusion that they were trying to get him _out._ Which – what even the –

The door squeaked one last time. The extra bolts groaned and strained, but he could distinctly hear someone picking at them. And he'd only ever known one man so handy with locks and knots and cuffs and chains and getting out of every sort of entrapment that could be imagined, but –

One more clatter. The heavy door groaned an inch open. Then another. Then a splinter of dim, strangled light fell through, and there was the absolutely bloody last person on the face of the earth he had expected to see, standing there as coolly as you damned well pleased, as if they'd crossed paths at a traveling fair and not in the depths of the bloody White fucking Tower of the bloody Tower of fucking London. "Scarlet. Trying out to be a bat, eh?"

"Shut it, you," Will snarled, jerking and writhing and helpfully presenting his rear aspect for the Captain's personal examination (well, mooning 'im was only the least of what he could do to express his strong feelings on the matter). "Get me out of these damn things or get in 'em yourself."

Hook cocked a categorically sardonic eyebrow. "That's no way to speak to someone who's here to rescue you."

"It's exactly the way to speak to someone who left me behind in Archibald sodding Hopper's office and ran off like a nincompoop!"

"Ah." The Captain stepped in and began working at Will's chains, clearly in a hurry but not desperate. "Would it help if I did say I was sorry for that?"

"Wouldn't believe you anyway. Oy, watch it!" Will tried to spin himself around to get a look at what exactly the villain thought he was up to with the hook, but no use. Sensing that his best contribution to the process would to be remain as still as possible, so he could get free and _then_ punch the arsehole in the pretty face, he forced himself to hold his peace as Jones pried at the locks. He knew they didn't have much time. The guards would be up here any second, even if they _were_ momentarily distracted, and they would find them a nice set of his-and-his fetters if they were caught like this. But the Captain, no matter his other and numerous character deficiencies, was a professional, and in a few more moments, Will was forced to do a stupid little somersault as he fell out of his chains and nearly landed on his head. Before the Captain could say a word about how this was liable to improve either his looks or his intelligence, he popped to his feet. "Right. Don't really need the guided tour, do we? Let's scarper."

"After you, mate." Hook swept a flourishing bow as they darted out of the cell and down the steps beyond, trying to navigate the twisting, narrow stone without splattering all the way to the bottom. Will would have fired back something snappy if he could bring it to mind, but he couldn't, just now. Was only trying not to do anything that he would regret later – there was no way Hook was going to let him back on the _Jolly Roger,_ was there? Not that he wanted to return, not really. Turn around and Bob's your uncle and Killian would be handing him off to –

Will's ruminations were cut short, however, as torchlight flared in the hallway directly in front of them, and the dramatic ingress of numerous enraged Beefeaters in their silly poofter uniforms was to be observed. Killian grabbed him with his hook and jerked them behind a suit of armor just in time, and they stayed utterly silent, occasionally exchanging mutinous glances to let the other know they still didn't like each other, thanks plenty. As soon as the Beefeaters pelted past, Killian made a lunge out, but then had to jerk back again as two men in silken cravats and fine beaver tophats, clearly gentlemen of worth, followed the guards, looking annoyed at the ruckus and conversing in low voices.

". . . this rate, do us far more good to storm into the _Riksdag_ and hold a bloody pistol to their heads. . . what on earth the President supposes himself to accomplish with this hare-brained plot of trying to kidnap her _. . ."_

"You know the _Kongeriger_ has the best quality of the stuff in the world. We can't let a woman hold us hostage for power. And what with all this talk of the Highland miners going on strike, stubborn Scottish heathens, two or three birds with one stone, you know."

"Yes, but how he reckons he's going to get his hands on the _queen. . ."_

"Wouldn't do to be doubting him, don't you think?"

Beside him, Will felt Killian go very stiff, listening as hard as he could. So was he, for that matter. Aside from the fact that this clearly had something to do with another nefarious escapade by Robert Gold, it sounded like something of cardinal significance to know. The _Kongeriger_ _Norge og Sverige,_ the United Kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, had the best deposits of aether in the world, the golden dust that powered every magician and every government and every magisterium. Queen Elsa of Norway and Sweden, however, had recently become a massive pain in the Royal Society's arse, enforcing trade embargoes and hiking customs dues, in retaliation for their economic manipulation to drive the price of aether to dirt-cheap lows; Britain made all the money in the current system, and the _Kongeriger_ made none. And as the Royal Society needed aether to continue doing magic, they could not merely stop buying; the Scottish mines did not produce enough, and not of the best quality. It had been a brewing tension for months, and now seemed to be coming to a head. If Gold was so far out of his bloody mind as to _kidnap the Queen_ and hold her for ransom, force the _Kongeriger_ to capitulate. . .

 _Bloody hell,_ Will thought. Almost all magicians, those trained formally at school and university who did it as a profession, were "symbionts" – they needed to have a physical quantity of aether on their person at all times to perform spells, and doing so used it up, requiring periodic replenishment. Most British magicians kept their aether in gilded snuffboxes or monogrammed cufflinks or signet rings with secret compartments, and each month they had to present themselves at Society headquarters with the proper paperwork to receive their next month's supply. It was as tedious as any bureaucracy, but it was in the Society's vested interest to keep it that way. Then they could control who was using magic, under what conditions, and easily cut off troublemakers who were running amok. It was also why they hated "savants," or those naturally gifted to sense the aether and who could do magic under any conditions, so much. Most of the savants were the ones who ended up in the Night Market, outside the Society's regulation and control, and hence dangerous and subversive persons who rarely lasted long if they were clumsy enough to get caught.

Therefore, if Queen Elsa was throwing her weight around with the Royal Society's aether pipeline, she was in considerable danger. Might have already been kidnapped, knowing Gold and the way he got what he wanted. Not that he would ever be so clumsy as to be caught with his fingerprints on it. It would look entirely like someone else's crime, and he would be the one to magnanimously swoop in and solve the crisis – after wringing considerable concessions from the _Kongeriger_ , of course. But if not, if they knew it was him all along. . . if a brave and handsome thief spoiled things for him, say. . . 

Will waited until he was sure the magicians were gone, then grabbed Killian and broke cover, sprinting out into the Tower garth. The night had gone mad with yells and gunshots, he saw something that he'd swear was a damn wolf lunging at another rank of guards – and nearby, perhaps the most shocking of all, the blonde woman he had met at Archibald Hopper's. Elizabeth Turner. Currently being besieged by a flock of ravens descending on her – she was screaming and batting at them, but more and more were closing in –

Will merely stared, deciding that attempting to figure this out would only make his head hurt, then jerked at the Captain's arm. "Oy! You! Let's go!"

Killian Jones paid no attention. Instead he hesitated, then wheeled around, drew a pistol, and let loose into the shrieking swarm of birds above Elizabeth's head – though Will would wager a bloody fortune that wasn't her real name, even as Bill Crimson hadn't been his. (Clumsy effort, he knew, but she was beautiful, what was he supposed to do – be clever?) The shot ripped into them, scattering black feathers, and the ravens cleared off momentarily. Enough for Elizabeth to get free and struggle over to them. "What the – _where's Dr. Hopper?"_

"Haven't seen 'im!" Will yelled back. "And how's it this evenin', Miss _Turner?"_

"Wha – oh." She stared at him, then in a moment more, recollected where they had met before. "What do you mean, you don't know where Archie is?!"

"Didn't see him after the bloody peelers caught us! Only took me here. Him, God knows, though I think I might 'ave seen him gettin' carted away to an airship or – "

This fascinating disquisition was interrupted with another volley loosed overhead, and the Captain grabbed Elizabeth by the wrist, pulling her against him, as they made a communal exit as fast as they could go back toward the river gate. There was a skiff there, but the guards were closing in, they weren't going to make it in time, they weren't –

Will felt every hair on the back of his neck stand up, and then a monstrous shadow leapt overhead, landing and taking form as a huge grey wolf that snarled and snapped and bared its teeth at the Beefeaters, who screeched to a halt with exclamations of horror. Someone was shouting for someone else to fetch a silver weapon from the armory, and another was yelling that the Metropolitan were on the way with _their_ wolves, and in the merciful moment of time this bought them, the Captain jerked Elizabeth with his hand and Will with his hook and toppled all three overboard into the tiny boat, which rocked and sloshed and nearly went under. But they recovered long enough for Elizabeth to grab the pole, the Captain to fire at one particularly hardy Beefeater who'd dodged the wolf, and Will to sit there like a useless twit as the boat lurched into motion.

"What about Ruby?" Elizabeth screamed. "Are we just going to – "

"She seems to have it under control, love!" Killian bellowed back, pulling another pistol out from his limitless supply and putting the ball neatly through a Beefeater's hat. "Let's just get the bloody hell out of here!"

The Traitor's Gate was hammering to. They would never make it out, would be pinned against it, trapped and ripped to shreds. But then Will had just enough presence of mind to throw his arm out, feel the pain as the iron teeth of the portcullis grated against it – he'd spent too much bloody time recently being bit by something or other – and wrench it back long enough for Elizabeth to slam the nose of the boat through the gap, gunshots hailing into the water all around them and the acrid whiff of saltpeter burning in his throat. Then they were through into the dark water of the Thames, Elizabeth poling madly as Killian provided covering fire for their retreat. Will's apparent purpose remained only to serve as cannon fodder, but he flung himself flat as a round tore over his head and splashed off to starboard. Lights were flaring along the riverbank as the alarm spread.

"Got – to get – _out_ of here," Killian panted again, and shouted something to Elizabeth. She sped up with the poling, and he was doing something with the ring on his thumb, the one that triggered a klaxon on the _Roger_ , letting the pirates know that their captain was in danger and they should bring the ship to him immediately; the magic link also provided their location. They only needed to survive a few minutes more, give the crew time to get her fired and flown over here, and indeed, that was exactly what they did. Then with a roar from the skies, a great dark shadow swooped overhead, and someone above threw the rope ladder.

Still firing with his good hand, the Captain pushed Elizabeth toward it, and Will grabbed her around the waist and hoisted her as she clawed for the first rung. The night was split apart with white-hot flashes and the crack of artillery. Glancing up, Will could see the _Roger_ running out the long nines, strafing the ancient ramparts of the Tower with fire. But Elizabeth was still climbing and he was climbing after her and last of all came Killian, his gun clicking as it emptied. The _Roger_ was already pulling up, gaining altitude, as they tumbled onto the delightfully solid deck and just lay there for several moments, wheezing.

"There, Cap'n, how's that?" The voice of Mr. Smee came from above them, offensively cheery. "Another tight corner wiggled out of and no harm done, wouldn't you say?"

"Depends on your definition of harm, I suppose." Killian Jones rocked back onto his heels, still panting, and then slowly chanced his feet. He leaned down to give Elizabeth a hand, which she accepted warily. "Get us the bloody hell out of here."

"Already underway, Cap'n. Which course should we set?"

Elizabeth opened her mouth in outrage, pushing away from the pirate. "If you think you're going to get away with keeping me on this ship as a – "

"Could always jump right back overboard and fly to your friends in the Tower, Swan. If they didn't shoot the bloody bejesus out of you first."

 _Swan, eh?_ Will thought, intrigued. Whoever she was, the woman was looking outraged as the Captain turned back to Smee. "I have certain information to sell to my patron, as regards the actions of Robert Gold and the Royal Society. Not to mention a few other bits and pieces that will be to his interest. And he told me where to find him when I had such things. Hence, that is where we'll be going."

Smee blinked. "Your patron? Jafar?"

The Captain shot a narrow look at him. "Mr. Smee."

"Right then. So, Paris?"

A pause. "No," Killian Jones said. "Prague."


	8. Chapter 8

The Astronomical Clock was the marvel of Prague. Gilded hands stroked age-old paint, golden numbers, and the rings that fitted the arc of the heavens and measured the inexorable path of time. There were many intricate figures, the signs of the zodiac, the coordinates of the sky. An astrolabe relayed them to the circling rings, four in all, which moved to the delicate whir of machinery and treadles. It ran the same as any other clock, subject to the terror of faulty windings and broken springs and stubborn gears, but it was more than that. The Astronomical Clock held the secrets of the stars, and the legend ran that its architect had been blinded to prevent him from ever equaling its majesty. This wonder was housed in a square stone room at the top of a square stone tower, grey stone inset with glowering window-slits and a crowning spire, to which strictly no one was permitted access. There was good reason for this: there was a belief that the clock could prophesy, and what it said was not to be disregarded. It was also said that once a year, at the turning of the calendar, it showed the fate in store for Prague.

This was, naturally, much debated. The soothsayers and horologists that were apt to give their opinions on it had no standing in public society, though it could not be denied that just a few short years ago, the clock (if one counted bursting into flame) had seemed to predict the rebellions of 1848, against Chancellor Metternich and the Bohemian Magisteria. Even with several shiploads of smuggled weapons bought from a notorious airship pirate, the Czech edition of these had not enjoyed much success. Prague was a city of bitter discontent: with the stifling bureaucracy, with the powerful British Royal Society that had helped quash the revolts (wanting no rivals to London as the magic capital of the world) with the strict rationing of essentials imposed as punishment, and near about everything else. Groups of students gathered in smoky taverns, handbills appeared on the bridges over the River Vltava, and the narrow lanes, crowded with tall stone townhouses and red-tiled roofs, seemed to beckon with whispers and strange things hung in dark shop windows, rain spattering the worn cobbles. The graveyards played host to an increasing number of mediums claiming to speak to the dead. Several times it had been suggested that they direct their efforts in the direction of the late, great sorcerer and rabbi Judah Loew. If ever there had been a time for the golem to rise again, this time was now.

Prague, in short, was an inferno waiting to happen, and all that was needed was one small spark.

* * *

Once she had recovered from her discombobulation and dislike at finding herself trapped aboard the _Jolly Roger_ for the foreseeable future, the first thing Emma did was refuse to take the captain's cabin. She would find herself some dark corner down in the hold and stay out of everyone's way, thanks, but Jones was persistent. "The alternative is bedding down with _that_ lot of hooligans – " a disdainful glance at Will Scarlet – "in the crew's quarters, and none of us want that, do we?"

"I dunno," Will remarked. "Wouldn't be the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

"And that would be precisely why you need the cabin," Jones went on, not missing a beat. "A. . . well-bred lady such as you, it would not be at all mannerly. Just take it. I'm not to have any use for it, I'll be off steering the bloody ship. Though you strike me as the sort of woman who could manage herself quite nicely if there should happen along a threat to her virtue. Good night, then."

With that, and no further ado, he strode off, leaving Emma scowling after him and a clearly still rather hopeful Will Scarlet lurking at her back. "Er," he said, clearing his throat. "S'pose I should thank _you_ at least for gettin' me out."

"I didn't have anything to do with it," Emma said coolly. "I was hoping to rescue Archie Hopper, not you. It was Hook's idea, so you can save it."

Therefore afforded the opportunity to make her own pointed exit, she did so, after just enough of a delay to make it look as if she was not obeying their orders. But she did need a quiet place to gather her thoughts, and the captain's cabin was the only place she could hope to have a degree of privacy. Thanks to the first mate's injudicious slip of the tongue, she now knew that the captain was working for Jafar, the very one Gold had mentioned to her, who was possibly searching to raise the terrible and legendary Golem of Prague and do – well, she didn't know exactly what, but she had a hunch that it wasn't to invite the Royal Society over for afternoon tea. Was she supposed to thwart Jafar, or hope that he succeeded, to get her off the hook (so to speak) with Gold? But no matter how anxious she was to avoid punishment, she couldn't quite extend that to wishing destruction on all of London. _So I'll make deadly enemies of two powerful and dangerous sorcerers. Wonderful._

Blowing out a breath, Emma shut the cabin door and leaned against it. It looked essentially the same as when she had last been here, with the obvious lack of amorous pirates, and after making sure the door could lock, she crossed to the table and sat down. She was still notably short on anything resembling a plan. Bluff it as far as Prague, she supposed, see what intelligence she could gather on Jafar and his dealings, manage the high-wire act and stay balanced long enough not to get too far on anybody's bad side. Jones had offered her protection, but that was a fool's errand. He thought she'd be _safe_ with a wanted criminal, constantly one step ahead of the countless factions that wanted him dead? She still had the option of a deal with Pan in her back pocket, she reminded herself. But considering how that could turn even worse than what she was currently in. . .

Absorbed in her unquiet thoughts, Emma did not immediately notice that the ride, instead of smoothing out as they ascended, was growing rougher. Finally, as she was almost pitched out of her chair as the ship yawed hard to port, she was forced to grab onto the bed to steady herself, but the floor continued to rock and roll. Then something hit the ship broadside, clanging off the heavy timbers with a sound like a cannonball, and considering the circumstances of their departure, this was not at all out of the realm of possibility. She could hear shouting and pounding footsteps above, and decided on the spot that the only thing worse than being a virtual prisoner on a pirate ship was to die on said ship while hiding uselessly belowdecks like a coward. So she threw back on her cloak, pulled up her hood, and emerged into the tempest.

The wind caught at her, screaming, and almost flung her off into the bottomless, boiling cauldron of clouds below. The pirate ship was flying toward a pitch-black thunderhead, lightning crackling in sickly spears, and the rain was hard enough to drench her in instants. Nonetheless, she staggered across the deck toward the helm-house, where a goggle-wearing, oilskin-clad Killian Jones was hauling on the wheel with hand and hook and bellowing orders to his crew. Preoccupied as he was, he didn't see her until she loomed up directly in front of him, then jumped. "Bloody hell, lass! What are _you_ doing here? Get below!"

"What is going _on?"_ Emma likewise had to raise her voice over the roar. "Are they – are we – "

"Aeromancers, I'd wager a damn fortune." Hook cursed and wrestled the wheel. "We weren't exactly inconspicuous leaving, after all, and they think if they can magic up enough of a gale – "

Just then, one of his crew shouted up at him, and the captain roared back, gesturing at the thunderhead. Emma gaped, then stared. "You're not flying _into_ that storm, are you?"

"They'd be bloody madmen to follow us, wouldn't they?" The ship jolted forward as more gas crackled into the zeppelin, and she nearly lost her balance again, grabbing the pirate's arm. "Besides, I just got this damned thing back together, I'm not letting them tear it apart!"

"You can't outrun that, it's _suicide –_ "

"I'm a hell of a captain, love." Despite everything, his teeth flashed at her in a cocky smile, even as the rain was now slanting almost horizontally into their faces. Hell, he _was_ insane. Aeromancers were magicians whose specialty was manipulating the weather – they could provide a lovely clear day for your wedding, a blizzard of hail and foul sleet when your rival was driving in his new open carriage with his wife in a new dress, or other such requests, and if there were several of them working together now, conjuring up a tempest great enough to knock an airship from the sky –

They were picking up speed, jerking and swaying, buffeted by wind and water. Emma could see the muscles in Hook's shoulders standing out through the jacket, pasted to his skin by the rain, as he fought the wheel, and after another particularly deafening crack of thunder, he almost lost hold of it. Without time to think, she butted in next to him and grabbed hold of it as well, the two of them steering the ship into the maelstrom, dodging and weaving as lightning crackled through the silver aerials. Despite herself, she felt a heady rush of exhilaration, a faint awareness that they made an excellent team, moving instinctively together as she leaned into him, he leaned into her, and they kept the _Roger_ just ahead of the worst of it. They were making it (why was she pleased about this?! They still weren't allies!) they were going to –

Emma only had a flash, almost a premonition, before a titanic white blast lit up the dark sky, and she heard a horrible hissing, wheezing sound as the ship did in fact begin to lose altitude, and fast. Through the glare, she could see that one of the silver aerials had been struck and melted, and a spark was running toward the silk dirigible. Hook was swearing and spinning the wheel to no effect, she could see Will below sliding across the deck as it was tilting, grabbing madly for a handhold but finding none, everything was jumbled and chaotic and happening too fast and then out of nowhere –

– it turned oddly, peculiarly slow. She was raising her hands as if to shield her face from the coming explosion that would kill them all, but it seemed to be taking a very long time. There was an odd heat in them as well that didn't come from the lightning, bubbling and brewing over, and she didn't know what to do with it other than throw it as hard as she could up at the wreckage, a golden net blossoming from her fingers and streaming upward –

And then, just as abruptly, everything went completely silent, as if time and space itself had been frozen. She could see it all very clearly. They weren't falling anymore, remained suspended in the sky, until with a flick of her wrist she directed them back upward, knitted the aerial back together, doused the spark – it was easy, shockingly easy. Everyone remained exactly where they were for the duration of this exercise, as if she was the only living person in a museum diorama, until all at once the trance broke and the noise and tumult of the storm crashed in around her, knocking her to her knees. She felt weak and drained and dizzy and terrified, not sure what she had just done or how, until a dark shadow loomed over her and the captain was covering her with his heavy leather jacket and bellowing at Will. "Bloody hell, Scarlet, take the helm and try not to crash us! _Now!"_

Doubtless Will made some smart remark about how Killian Jones had better not strain anything by daring to trust him even that much, but Emma didn't hear. Her legs still would not support her, she sucked air but couldn't get enough, and colored spots were reeling in her vision, so she had no choice but to hang onto Hook with both hands as he carried her below into the cabin, shut the door, and set her down on the bed. As she shivered and clutched the jacket closer – even wet, it was warm with the heat of his body and oddly comforting – he said grimly, "You're a savant, love. A bloody powerful one. Did you know that?"

"I. . . what?" Emma wiped the raindrops off her face. She knew dimly that this was some sort of magical classification – and also that it was not a good one. "I'm – I don't have magic, that was an – an accident. A one-time thing."

"Aye?" He raised an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced. "An accident that you channeled the aether and put the whole ship back together with barely the blink of an eye, and now you feel like absolute death? That's what it's like when that much latent power bursts out of you, that you can't contain or control. It's dangerous, if you repress it and repress it. It makes you go insane, eventually, or worse. If you do have it, you need to be trained."

"No. I'm a bounty hunter, not a. . . not one of. . . them." Much as she lived in and around the magical underworld, Emma had never felt any particular desire to join it. "Besides, what the hell do you know about this, anyway?"

"More than you think, love," he answered evenly. "Just to name one consequence, the Royal Society would be after you hell-for-leather if they discovered you were a savant."

Again, one of those oblique comments where she couldn't tell if he was slyly hinting that he was onto her, or fishing for information, or genuinely concerned about her well-being (that one at least she could safely cross off the list). And how convenient for him if she suddenly couldn't go near the Royal Society again. "Remind me again what that even is?"

"Someone who can perform magic whenever they want, who isn't dependent on physically having the aether dust on them. The Royal Society keeps their rank-and-file members, the symbionts, in order by rationing out a supply to them every month, can raise the amount if they've done well or cut it if they've misbehaved. Very effective. But for savants, see, you can't do that. That's why they don't admit them; you can't control their power. That's why they all end up in the Night Market, hunted and outlawed."

Emma made a noncommittal noise. Knowing the general temperament of the Society, she could not say that this information surprised her in the least. "And what? You just happen to know someone who will train me, out of the goodness of their heart?"

Killian Jones shrugged. "No, I don't. But it seems magic is a part of you, Swan, and you'll have to reckon with that one day. I've spent a good deal of time crossing up the Royal Society. I'm warning you, don't underestimate them."

"I am quite sure I can make that decision myself, without your help." She was still cold and wet, but Emma stood up sharply and shed his jacket, leaving it in crumpled leather folds on the bed. "When we reach Prague, I want – " Christ, what _did_ she want? "You will let me off the ship, and permit me to go about my business."

"And why would I do that, darling?" He studied her with those intensely blue eyes, the hint of a smirk playing at the fine-cut lips. "You've already proven that you mean me no good, and while I bear you no particular grudge for it, I'm not about to let you go running off to whoever you're working for and turn me in. I do value my own skin more than that. I _am_ a gentleman, so you will come to no harm as long as you are on board my vessel, but nor will you be allowed your personal liberty. When we arrive in Prague, Mr. Smee will be watching you."

"Not Will?" Emma asked, taking a gamble. "You don't trust him – you don't want him near what you're doing, surely?"

"I'd rather bloody have him where I can see him, rather than here making lost-puppy eyes at you and cocking up my plans all over again. And if you are not here when I return, well. . ."

"What? You're a great and terrible pirate and will tear Prague down stone by stone until you find me?" She scoffed, flouncing her damp skirts, uncomfortably aware that there wasn't as much space between them as she would like, and she seemed oddly unable to pull back. Maybe another kiss would properly dazzle him again, render him unable to hatch whatever cunning plot he had in mind. He had certainly seemed to enjoy their last one, but so had she, which was dangerous. She couldn't keep playing a game that might backfire on her, but for now, she had no other weapons. She put both hands on his chest, running them slowly over the wet, clinging sheer fabric of his shirt, and lowered her voice to a sensuous whisper. "Is that what you're going to do?"

He stared back at her, tongue creeping out to touch his lip, his ringed hand coming up to caress the curling blonde tendrils of hair out of her face. "I'm open to suggestions, love."

"Mmm?" Emma murmured, wedging herself closer, solidly against him. "No bargain anywhere? You _are_ a hard man, aren't you?"

"Indubitably." He gave a little thrust against her, letting her know in no uncertain terms that indeed he was, in more ways than one. They were starting to share breath again, her heart was speeding up despite her strict instructions to the contrary. It was merely animal, she told herself. That was all. Great Britain under Her Majesty Queen Victoria might be outwardly sternly repressed, buttoned-up, and puritanically severe about anything even possibly approaching carnal relations, but behind closed doors, they wrote all sorts of filthy literature, drew nude sketches, enjoyed bawdy burlesque shows, and more. Besides, Emma herself had never had the luxury of a naïve, sanctimonious view on the matter. She'd learned early what it was and how to use it, and she felt absolutely no guilt about doing so now.

She leaned in, stroking the point of the captain's ear. Slid her other hand down his back, pressing him into her, as his eyes fluttered and a deep, male sound of satisfaction inadvertently issued forth, sparking a small bright heat in her own stomach. Determinedly ignoring it, she leaned forward and was just about to see if his resolve to keep her captive would withstand another kiss, when the cabin door banged open, bringing with it a blast of wind, but not as much rain. "Captain!" Mr. Smee shouted. "Think we've made it clear of the worst of the storm, sir!"

"Thank you," Killian Jones snapped, pushing himself quickly backward from Emma. "Thank you very much."

"You're welcome, Cap'n!" Smee beamed munificently at them, then shut the door, apparently still in blissful ignorance of anything else he might have interrupted. Killian swore, running a hand through his hair and making it stand up in wild black cowlicks, then bent to retrieve his jacket, shrugged back into it with a squeak of wet leather, then stepped back, bowed precisely, and strode out after his first mate.

Emma sat down on the bed, aware that her knees were not as steady as she liked, and not just from the aftereffects of the magic. _I would have stayed in control, even if Smee hadn't come in, I would have done what I needed to and that would have been the end._ Trying to distract herself, she focused on the lantern across the room, wondering if she could in fact light it with her mind, but as hard as she stared, nothing happened and she only felt queasier than ever. _See, he was wrong. I don't have magic._ Of course he'd be lying about that. Just trying to scare her and manipulate her into his control. Deep breath, then another. Yes, the man was a peak physical specimen, but she knew better than that. No more of this game. She had to find another.

At last she stood up, emerged from the cabin into what had become a light sprinkle instead of a drenching downpour, and hurried belowdecks before anyone could see her. Skirted around the crew's quarters and descended into the dark, dank hold. Found a sheltered place against the bulkhead and sat down, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her cloak tight, shivering. Leaned back, closed her eyes, and listened to the distant hum, felt the ship fly on, until at last she fell into an uneasy, turgid sleep.

* * *

Emma was awoken some interminable time later by the sight of a lantern bobbing through the hold, a crash and a loud _"BLOODY HELL!"_ as someone stubbed his toe, and a sheepish-looking Will Scarlet materializing behind the light, limping and trying not to swear some more. "Oy, lass. What in damnation are you doin' down here? It's cold and dark and smells like arse. Besides, we're almost to Prague. Come on."

Emma sat up groggily, rubbing her eyes. Ignoring his offered hand, she struggled to her feet. She was hungry enough to eat a brace of oxen raw, but didn't plan to still be aboard ship long enough to eat. She'd just have to think on her feet, and she followed Will without protest to the ladder, climbing up after him into a cold, rose-colored dawn. Looking over the railing, she could see the spectral, gothic spires of Prague rising in the mist, the distant glow of still-lit lamps among the narrow streets, the glass of the River Vltava bridged by elegant triple-arched spans, and the castle on its high hill. They were coming down for a landing, the captain behind the wheel, as the city rose up to take them in. They hit with a splash and a fantail of water, riding the wash to the nearest quay, where the crew scrambled overboard to make them fast. Emma stood watching, a new plan occurring to her, and as Hook and Will were making ready to go (evidently he was not joking about keeping him in sight at all times) she stepped forward. "I'm coming too."

"No, you're not."

"If I'm staying on this ship, you're tying me up."

"Don't tempt me, love." Again, that bloody tongue flick. If it wasn't illegal, it should be, and Emma suddenly found herself having a great deal more sympathy for the committees on Public Virtue that should be regulating such things. "For a one-handed man, I am quite deft with knots."

"Are you?" Smiling demurely at him, Emma hiked up her ruffled skirts just far enough to expose one well-turned ankle in its black heeled boot (prompting a reverent murmur of awe from the crew) then strolled to the side and jumped overboard, landing on the pier with a clunk. "How about when I'm off the ship and oh. . . strolling up to the city? What then?"

With a muttered few words that sounded distinctly like, "Bloody woman," Hook and Will followed her, and after a few shouted instructions from the captain to his crew, they set off into the dim, shadowed streets. Here and there a candle flared from behind wooden shutters, or a shopkeeper was out sweeping his stoop and hanging his shingle, but for the most part, Prague was still asleep, though the knocker was out with his long stick, rapping on people's windows to get them to rouse in time for work. The bells of St. Vitus Cathedral boomed in the distance, calling six, the hour of Prime.

Emma quickened her pace, drawing level with Hook. "Have you been here before?"

"Oh, aye. Sold them weapons in the '48 risings. The reason for which the Royal Society first condemned me to death – or was it the second? After I deserted the Navy, that must have been the first. And there might have been more, I don't remember."

"How many prices _do_ you have on your head?"

"A fair few." He shrugged. "You get used to it after a while. Hurry up, you lollygags, we're on a schedule."

"Schedule, is it?" Will Scarlet muttered dubiously. "And what're you intending to do with us while you trot off to your nice mornin' tea with your barmy sorcerer mate? Post us to keep the watch, or stuff us up and give us as presents?"

"As a matter of fact, I do expect you to wait for me. I wouldn't inflict you on anyone as a gift. Furthermore, I shall know if you attempt escape, and it won't go well for you. The lady I might disposed to consider with more leniency, but not you, I'm afraid."

"Of course. You didn't do anything like leavin' me behind to get shut up in the bleedin' Tower, why would I have the least reason not to trust you?" The young thief rolled his eyes. "Oh, none, not at all, innocent as a little lamb, that's you, probably sounds like a bleat when you f – ouch!"

"Shut up," the pirate ordered tersely. "We're here."

They had come to a halt in front of a tall, gloomy townhouse, indistinguishable from any of its tall, gloomy neighbors in the narrow lane, but with a certain foreboding air about it that made Emma think she would indeed be quite all right with remaining outside. Heavy dark curtains veiled all the windows, the carved bronze knocker glowered ominously, and a faint smoke was spiraling from the chimney. All three of them surveyed it up and down, momentarily united by the unfamiliarity, and Will scratched his head and said, "Looks like that place in bloody Fleet Street where they found the barber and his missus was makin' blokes into pies. Now, you are an annoying bastard, Jones, but turnin' you into supper seems a bit cruel. Think of all the poor folk who'd have to eat you."

"Your wit is just as dismal as ever, I see." Hook raised one eyebrow. "You two shall wait outside until I come back. I hope the audience shall be brief, but even if it's not, you'll be here. Otherwise, cannibalistic pastry will be the least of it."

"Aye aye, captain." Will snapped off a resigned salute, then glanced at Emma and smirked. "Don't worry, we'll be havin' plenty of fun down 'ere wifout you."

"Cannibalistic. Pastry."

"Fine, fine, keep your hair on." Will leaned against the grey stone wall and began ostentatiously inspecting his fingernails. "So," he said loudly to Emma. "How about the weather, then? Ruddy awful. Can't think who'd make us stand out in it."

She had to bite her lip to stop a smile. "It's not that bad. You're from London, you must be used to it."

Hook eyed them for a long moment with a deeply malevolent expression. At last, evidently electing not to waste further time, he strode up the townhouse steps, banged the bronze knocker with authority, and waited until the door swung open. Then with one final glance back at them (she was surely imagining things to think it was in any way concerned), he vanished into the sorcerer's lair.

* * *

Inside the house, it was dark as the devil's armpit, if not smelling quite as bad, and Killian had to walk with hand and hook outstretched, trying to lessen the chances of him blundering into some irreparable artifact and giving Jafar even more reason to be displeased with him. He did not have the bottle the man had asked for, but he hoped to barter the information about Queen Elsa and hence gain some time and lenience in which to do so. In the back of his head, there was a small voice asking if he really thought Jafar was going to attempt any sort of humanitarian act to save her from the Royal Society's clutches – if he did, it would just be to kidnap her himself and likewise hold the _Kongeriger_ over a barrel. But, Killian reminded himself, that was immaterial. He was a pirate, he didn't care about any kings or queens or even if all of bloody Europe should go up in flames again. There would be plenty of work for him if so, and Jafar would reward him with the information of how to kill Gold, which was still all he cared about.

His shin painfully encountered what appeared to be the first of a set of steps, and swearing under his breath, he gingerly lifted a boot, discovered that this hypothesis was correct, and ascended up to the landing, where the light was better. There was no sign of which among the several closed doors might contain a dread sorcerer behind it, so he chose the first one at random, and knocked on it. Not that one, so he crossed the hall and tried another. He was just wondering how long this would keep up when a voice from the end called, "Down here, Captain."

Blinking, Killian oriented himself in the correct direction and proceeded through into a large, beamed room with heavy mahogany bookcases and tall windows, equipped nearly as lavishly as the previous residence in Paris. He hesitated on the threshold, then made an impeccably correct bow. "My lord."

"Indeed." Jafar sat behind a claw-footed table, clad in pinstriped morning suit and silk cravat, placidly stirring sugar into a cup of tea. "You should have announced yourself. That way we could have properly known you were coming. Surely you have good news to hasten you on your errand?"

"Of a sort, aye."

Jafar continued to stir sugar into his tea, set the spoon down, and delicately picked up the cup, pinky extended. He took a genteel sip, then put it back on the saucer and buttered a crumpet. "Prague seems familiar to you. You will have been here before, I gather."

"Aye." Killian glanced around. "You travel in style, evidently."

Jafar laughed. "My dear captain, this is only one of several properties I own. Prague and I have always found common purpose in our loathing of the Royal Society, I daresay I spend nearly as much time here as I do in Paris. So, then. Do you have the item of my interest?"

"No, but I do have information. Robert Gold and his creatures intend to kidnap Queen Elsa of Norway and Sweden, in a ploy to force her to remove the embargoes she has placed on the aether trade. It won't appear to be by their hand, of course. Someone else shall visibly do the dirty work, and then Gold gets to swoop in and be a hero by resolving the crisis and valiantly winning the queen her freedom. Hence resulting in even more and bountiful aether supplies for Britain, and the poorhouse for the rest."

Jafar took another sip. "How fascinating."

Killian had hoped for something a bit more substantial than this; the man did not look surprised in the least. "We'd have to wreck his plans then, aye?"

 _"We?_ What a familiar article, and used with so little merit." Jafar sighed. "While it is incidentally useful that you have some worth as a political spy, I have other personnel directed to that end. Though it would be quite a spectacle, I grant you. She's a savant, did you know?"

Killian was caught off guard. "Wh – who?"

"Queen Elsa." Jafar smiled. "Her particular magic is some branch of hydromancy, manifesting as ice. Most likely that's how she has been able to enforce her blockade – if she freezes the aether steamers in port, they can't sail south and sell their cargo to the British anyway, as some captains of dubious reliability may be tempted to do if all that was at stake was money. As for the airships, a similar principle applies. Freeze them solid. Such an elegant solution, if rather an ill-advised one. And I have always found savants so interesting, don't you agree? How is it that they alone defy the laws of nature that govern the rest of us? Man is not meant to do magic without the assistance of the aether dust, yet they do, as easily as breathing. No right, no wrong, no rules. They are free. Do you imagine the ability is heritable, bred in the blood, or perhaps transferable, like vampirism or lycanthropy? Someone as wealthy and powerful as Queen Elsa can escape censure for it, but another one, say. . . I should quite like to have one for my own, for inspection and dissection. Do you know where I could find such a thing, Captain?"

"No. True savants are very rare. Most of the crowd in the Night Market are charlatans or hankymen or symbionts who simply were not good enough, or not high-born enough, to be admitted to the Royal Society. And I've heard the Night Market itself has encountered a spot of bother. In short, you'd do better looking for leprechaun gold at the end of a rainbow."

"How very Irish of you, Captain. You sound so English that I nearly forget, sometimes. But you are quite resourceful, so if I did formally put the task to you, you could surely carry it out. Especially if the price of failure was my extreme displeasure. You _will_ soon have that bottle, I trust?"

"Aye. Matters were just a bit. . . complicated."

"They seem to have become unusually so, ever since you entered my employ. Sit down, a gentleman does not hover like a stork at breakfast." Jafar gestured at the other brocade-backed chair, which after a moment of hesitation, Killian occupied. Patting his mouth daintily with a linen serviette, the sorcerer went on, "Revenge, in my experience, is rarely a complicated affair. You _do_ want it, don't you?"

"Of course. More than anything."

"Good. It would be a pity if our paths diverged so soon. Though I shall admit it is not entirely undesirable that you turned up here, as there _are_ other ingredients you can procure for me. You will have heard, I presume, of a golem?"

"Aye."

"Clumsy things. Blood magic and clay." Jafar sniffed. "I have been making enquiries into the method of its crafting, as a contingency plan if you will, but I have no real intentions to _use_ it. I prefer far more sophisticated methods. Yet it is crucial that the Royal Society thinks this is my actual aim, so I have allowed myself to be seen and heard doing so, and must maintain the illusion to the fullest degree. There is one particular item – the _shem,_ the enchanted paper that gives such a creature life – that I have found myself unable to come by. I do have an inkling of where it might be located, but no present way to acquire it. Are you following my intimations, Captain?"

"Quite easily." Killian rested an arm on his knee. "You want me to get it. Why? How will this help me kill Gold?"

"Patience, my dear fellow, patience. All will be revealed in time. In the interim, you merely have to trust me. One other matter." Jafar set aside his breakfast plate, made a deft motion with his hands, and while Killian had not seen it before, in the next instant, a black-handled dagger with an ancient-looking iron blade appeared between them. Jafar held it up, and it caught the light in a strange, eldritch shine. "Do you know what this is?"

"Should I?"

"In the _Key of Solomon,_ a grimoire incorrectly attributed to the biblical monarch of the same name – who was himself a noteworthy sorcerer, I will have you know – mention is made of a black-handled knife, the _arthame_ , of particular power. But the _Key_ was in fact the work of Renaissance magicians, in the age when aether itself was discovered and first made use of. There is a theory that aether is particles of space and time and light itself, that the manipulation and control of all these things are possible to one who truly masters it. This knife, well. . . one must be cautious when trawling in the antiquities market, of course, but I have reason to believe that it is the very _arthame_ the grimoire refers to, and hence capable of great things once I unlock its full power. Do you think I have come this far to fail in my task? Surely not, Captain."

"No," Killian allowed. He did not doubt it in the least, in fact, and nor did he doubt that Jafar was telling the truth. He had never had a drop of magical ability in any shape or form, and had always been devoutly grateful for it, but even he could sense the _wrongness_ boiling off the knife, like a black stain on his bones, as if it could cut a hole into the fabric of the world itself and let the demons out to devour it. He felt slightly nauseous, as if the room was turning under his feet. "I, ah, appreciate your point most clearly, my lord. Shall you just – ?"

"Certainly. How discourteous of me." Jafar made another motion, and the knife vanished. "Now then. I have a busy agenda for the next fortnight. I have just closed a deal on a piece of property in Monaco, that little seaside principality by France and Italy. Not much to look at, just the moment – the district it's located in is known as, I am led to collect, _Les Spélugues,_ or 'Den of Thieves.' Terribly unaesthetic, wouldn't you agree? But that was why I was able to buy it so inexpensively, so I should count my blessings. But I intend to build a house of gaming there, a casino, for the rich and idle élite of Europe. The first order of business is to change the name. Monte Carlo, I think. It makes it sound much more exclusive. Make fools believe they are princes, and they shall gladly give you much more of their money, by their own free will, than you could ever have acquired dishonestly."

"I have encountered something of the same, my lord. So. . ."

"I shall leave on the morrow. When I return, I expect that you will have procured the _shem._ If so, we shall continue our business interests. If not. . . well, you would really rather prefer to avoid that eventuality, Captain."

"Mmm." Killian leaned back in the chair. "So where is it?"

"In the vaults of St. Vitus Cathedral. There was quite some fuss and feather that the _shem_ was originally a _Jewish_ piece of magic, you see, and that would not do at all. So some magician in the pay of the Catholic Church came up with a new version of it, imprimatur and all, and that is the one I seek to acquire. I cannot do it myself, as there are certain protections that will. . . detect me. But you, as a person of no magical ability whatsoever, can do it with some luck and skill, both of which I am certain you possess in spades. Even the Tower of London itself might not be safe from your determination."

Killian paused, then nodded stiffly. "Aye. I can do that."

"Capital." Jafar gulped the rest of the tea, and made a gesture that was clearly of dismissal. But as Killian got up to leave, he glanced up and added, "Oh, and do pass along my regards to Will Scarlet. So kind of you to see he wasn't left behind."

"I am not quite sure what – "

"Oh, and a gentleman would never fail to present his compliments to a lady." Jafar's lips split in a very white and very lethal smile. "Especially one so charming as Miss Emma Swan."


	9. Chapter 9

Will Scarlet and Emma Swan had been standing side by side, listening to the bells of Prague call the morning hours as misty sunlight blossomed over the city – she imperviously repelling his periodic attempts at small talk – when the door of the brownstone flew open with a crash. The reason it had done so was for a clearly out-of-temper Killian Jones, coattails swirling, to storm through it in magnificently black dudgeon. This he did, without so much as a sidelong glance at them, and proceeded out of sight down the alley at a correspondingly blistering pace. They had to run to catch up with him, which Will did by the arm, spinning him back around to face them. "Oy! Where n' blazes are you off to now, leavin' us behind as a snack? Because I'm not bloody going to do that ag – "

"Shut up," the pirate snapped. "We've got something else to steal, and we have to do it as soon as possible."

Will arched a skeptical eyebrow, in perfect imitation of the captain's own habit. "Oh? And what's it this time? The Queen of Sheba's jewels, I reckon?"

Hook flinched for some reason, but angrily brushed it off. "My – patron," he said, "requires something kept in the vaults of St. Vitus Cathedral, which he cannot retrieve himself due to there being wards against any person of magical ability. I, for obvious reasons, cannot permit the lady out of my sight, as then she'll immediately run off and turn us in to whatever highly placed employer she has in the British Government. Nor can I permit you to watch her, because I don't trust you either. Therefore you, Will Scarlet, are going to do as you did at the Great Exhibition, and steal us the item in question."

"Am I." The young man's tone dripped sarcasm. "Let me out of your sight and trust me to do what you want and not, say, nick it for myself and sell it out for some staggeringly high sum? After you've just told me to me face that you won't and you don't? You have a bloody peculiar way of makin' friends, mate."

"You're not my friend. You're a member of my crew. You will do as I command."

"Am I?" Will repeated. The tension between the two was quickly darkening to open belligerence, and Emma put a hand to her derringer in the event she needed to fire a warning shot to break up a fight – a scenario which would then bring every constable in the city down on their heads, and hence was to be stringently avoided. Maybe she could just knock their heads together. "Seems to me that you made it damn clear I wasn't, not no more. And you can't _make_ me do anything. Pirates' code. Men serve or leave at their pleasure. Can't be pressed or forced like the bloody Navy. So – "

"I am delighted to see that you are so intimately acquainted with the work of our friends Morgan and Roberts," Killian Jones said icily. "But not so well as you think, else you'd remember that the captain _can_ press men when there is no one else suitable for the job. Not to mention that desertion in times of battle is punishable by death, and believe you me, this _is_ a battle. Aye, you may have ended up in the Tower by your own clumsiness, but _I_ bloody well got you out of it. You're mine, as long as I like, until I say you can leave. And I don't say."

"Why, you. . . you. . ." Will was to be observed fishing for an insult of suitable potency. "You grub-faced, snot-nosed, shit-arsed, pig-fucking, sleazy, treasonous, miserable, buggering _carbuncle!"_ he burst out at last. "Throw me out like rubbish one day, then hold me hostage the next when you need something. You selfish, arrogant son of a whore, I don't – "

 _"I have to!"_ Hook roared. "I have to! He'll have what he wants, and then I'll get what I want, and I'll have my life back! I have to. . . I _have_ to!"

Despite herself, Emma winced at the raw anguish in the captain's voice – and was disconcerted at how closely it resembled her own. From the look of things, both she and Killian Jones were doggedly pursuing service for powerful, dangerous men, against their better judgment, out of the desperate belief that when they were done, said men would reward them with everything they had ever desired, had suffered too long without. _But what if there are some things that even magic cannot mend? Even if Gold and Jafar kept every promise they made, and that is less than likely? What if we are just more of the same useless, disposable fools, gulled by the promise of having it all – and who would not be?_ She wondered suddenly who Killian's demons were, why he was so hell-bent on this, and then reminded herself that it was better not to know. Circumstances had forced them into a grudging working relationship, but they were, at best, cordial enemies. And he was still supposed to not even be that, just another faceless mark she turned in for the money and never thought of again. Supposed to be.

She and Will stood staring at Killian as his outburst faded – was that a glimmer of tears she saw in his eyes? Surely not. The pirate dragged his hand across his face, struggling to regain his composure. "As I said. We have no choice."

"Oh, but we do, mate. Sayin' we agree to this stupid plan of yours – why can't all three of us go down and get it?"

"Because as she proved to us so spectacularly on the ship, Miss Swan – oh, I doubt you've been properly introduced, Emma, Will, Will, Emma – is a savant. To take her down there, assuming the information about keeping out magical persons is correct, would not go well."

"So?" Will persisted. "That's a problem how? Seems to me it would be plenty convenient for our current difficulties if she just went. . . poof." He waved a hand vaguely, in apparent demonstration.

Emma's grip tightened on the derringer, removing and cocking it in the same swift motion. "If _that's_ your plan, I'm afraid something much worse than 'poof' is going to happen to you, right here."

"Don't mind her," Killian informed Will, "she derives a great deal of satisfaction from pointing guns at gentlemen of our particular description. As for your suggestion, no. I'm not going to waste her on _that,_ Christ! A savant could be useful in any number of ways, or profitable in others." His eyes darted briefly back down the street to Jafar's fortress-like residence. "Henceforth, as I said, the plan remains the same. We wait. You steal."

"Like hell I'm goin' to stick my neck out again and do all the dirty work. Specially if you're not even telling me what this bloody whatsit is."

Killian glowered at him, but Will glowered right back. At last, the captain expelled a frustrated sigh and glanced from side to side, scanning every corner and cranny for potential eavesdroppers, then beckoned Will nearer. Emma moved unobtrusively in as well, but even she couldn't make out what Killian whispered into his compatriot's ear. She did, however, see Will's startled, bug-eyed reaction. "What?! Bloody hell! No!"

"He says it's just a bluff," Killian snapped. "He's not planning to actually _use_ it."

Will regarded the older man with utter disbelief. "And you're buyin' that, Jones? _Really?_ He wants it just for collector's purposes, look nice in his parlor, that so? He'll have it there any time he wants! He could hold all of Prague hostage with that threat – bloody hell, all of Europe! I don't know much about this fellow, granted, but he strikes me as the sort who should be clapped up in that asylum back in London. He's not bloody _stable."_

"It doesn't matter to me what he's planning to do with it," Hook said flatly. "I don't care about Prague, or London, or the Royal Society. If he accomplishes what I suspect he's hinting at, it won't even matter, anyway."

Will continued to look stupefied, slowly shaking his head. "You're bein' a complete and total prat, I'll have you know, and that's the kindest way to put it." With that, he turned to Emma. "You. Tell him he's bein' a prat."

"And what on earth makes you think he'll listen to me?"

"Thought it was obvious. He fancies the lacy underthings right off you, that's why."

Emma choked, but Hook only looked furtherly annoyed. "Shut it, Scarlet, before I make you."

"Oh, make me, is it? That's right, I forgot, the only damn things you love in the world are the ghosts of your dead brother and your dead lady friend. And your ship, I suppose, but she don't keep you warm at night."

"Shut. It." Hook's face, instead of flushing, had gone pale, icy-white and remote. "Fine. What do you want? Name your price, I'll pay it. Just steal the fucking thing."

"We don't have to do this," Will said stubbornly. "We could leave, go somewhere else – America, maybe. The Royal Society's got no power there. There's all sorts of talk that half the damn country is right pissed about slavery, there might be a fight comin'. Plenty of work for us."

"And what?" Hook sneered. "Set up a happy home in a ménage a trois? No _thank_ you."

"Why d'you have to be such a bloody bastard all the time? I was serious!"

"We're not going to America. End of discussion. Now – "

"All right then. In that case, these are your choices, Jones. We all three of us go down there together and get the sodding thing, or you go down there yourself and leave me to watch the lady _._ I ain't doin' it alone this time."

There was a fraught, loathing silence, as Emma could see that Hook was calculating his chances of coaxing, cajoling, or clobbering his underling into submission. Then at last, he swore again and spun away on the heel of his boot. "I really hate you, you know that?"

"Bloody well, thanks," Will groused. "You're no basket of kittens and roses either, Cap'n. Right then. I'll help you steal the fool thing and hope you get your arse beat like a rented mule, because frankly you more n' deserve it at this point. Then when that's done, it'll no longer be a time of battle, so I'll have the right to leave the crew as I please. _You_ might not be goin' to America, but _I_ will. I'm gettin' far away from this madness, and fast."

Emma thought she spotted something odd in Killian's eyes, something desolate, angry, confused, almost heartbroken, but if so, it was gone again in the next instant, and his usual bitter, guarded expression took its place. "Very well, then," the pirate captain said coolly. "It's an accord."

Both men spat on their palms and eyed each other malevolently, then shook hands. Emma, however, hesitated, as this left her in a pinch. She was not eager to go down and confront whatever shadowy menace might lurk in the cathedral (though she was a fool to be worried – she didn't actually _have_ magic) but nor could she permit Killian Jones to once more hoodwink her and get away. That entailed going with him, but this also might be her only chance to escape and alert Gold of where they were and what was happening. There was no good choice, only selecting the lesser evil, and she was still wary of what Hook could know about Henry. If she did take him down, it would not be difficult for him, or his crew, to retaliate against her son. Lady Regina would defend him, Emma tried to reassure herself, but as far as she was aware, Regina was only a well-to-do Yorkshire lady who knew nothing about magic or the secrets of the Royal Society or any of it, wealthy women being vigorously discouraged from such topics of study. Hook's hare-brained tales about her having an enchanted vault were surely just that, lies and nonsense. _Will that be enough?_ It was very slender surety.

She cleared her throat. "If I'm not needed in this transaction, I shall just. . .?"

"Oh no, lass," Hook said, with a charming crocodile smile. "You're coming with us."

* * *

Though she had lived an adventurous life and run a great deal of risk, within the bounds of the law and without it, nothing in Emma's repertoire had prepared her for how one might go about robbing a cathedral. Though she was the furthest thing from devout, she couldn't help but feel a sinner's cold shiver scurry down her spine, as if the retribution for failure would be far worse than usual (or for success, come to that). Normally, one would start by picking up small magical items – and Prague had plenty of these establishments, even with the Night Market out of commission – but considering that magic was precisely what they did not want on this job, step one was perforce skipped. Emma asked if they were going to return to the ship, only for Killian to inform her that it was gone, had upped anchor and flown off soon after they disembarked. Smee and the crew had their orders to be spotted as far away from here as possible, plant a false trail about where he was and what he was doing. It was another example of his formidable cunning, and once again made her realize that she underestimated him at her own clear and present peril.

Instead, they passed the day in a small garret room, in a boarding house run by a large, square German hausfrau, who eyed them all suspiciously but asked no further questions after Killian accidentally spilled a large quantity of golden coins on her desk. There was a narrow bed covered with a patchwork quilt, which both the men gallantly offered to Emma, but she declined; there was no way she was going to sleep in front of them. Killian shrugged, then lay down on the floor, covered himself with his jacket, pillowed his head on his arm, and appeared to drop under almost instantly.

Emma watched him carefully, expecting some sort of trick or trap to put her off her guard, but as his breathing deepened to soft snores, she was forced to conclude that it was in fact genuine. She sat down on the bed, and despite her resolve to remain awake, she found herself drowsing too, until her head snapped up with a start and she realized in complete confusion that it was the middle of the afternoon. Hook and Will were sitting by the window, talking in low voices, and on seeing that she was awake, the former waved her over. "Hey, love. Will's nipped a bit of food. You must be hungry."

Emma was about to stiffly rejoin that she was not, thank you very much, but her stomach growled loudly, making the lie quite obvious, and she gritted her teeth and came over to join them. She wondered which honest Czech baker Will had burgled, but the savory sausage _kolaches_ and warm stuffed pierogi were too good to resist, and she couldn't remember the last time she had eaten; she barely stopped to breathe until her share was gone. Hook and Will appeared entertained by her unladylike manners, but made no comment.

When she had gulped down the last crumbs, the pirate said, "Right then. We go after Compline's over. There won't be any worshipers there, and the priest will have gone to bed. I've got this – " he pulled a glossy paper from his waistcoat, which when unfolded proved to be a pennyfarthing tourists' map of the cathedral – "and the entrance to the vaults is here. I am sure there will be barriers or obstacles of some sort, but otherwise, I'm hoping we can be in and out by midnight. Then we'll take a public dirigible to Monaco and deliver it to my patron in person. No mistakes this time."

Emma had heard of the stratagem of hiding in plain sight before, but this felt too dangerous. Still, she could not think of a good way to object, or even if she should. Maybe she could wait until they went down into the vault, then shut it, lock it, and run. There would be no airships leaving for London until the morning, but that was a small matter. With no magic, Hook and Will would be trapped underground with no way to get out, thus ensuring that they would be right there when she returned with Gold to collect them. It was possible. More than possible, it was the best plan she had yet had, and for some reason, that frightened her.

They whiled away the last hours in a tense, introspective silence, counting the bells, until it was time. They all donned heavy dark cloaks and hurried out into the chilly autumn night, and Emma kept close to Hook as he led them into the twisting streets. Evidently his previous escapades smuggling weapons here had furnished him with an extensive knowledge of its back roads and byways, and they spent particular time traversing a tunnel that, from its mud floor and faint rushing sound overhead, made her suspect that it led under the river Vltava. They climbed out on the far side, looking at the specks of light embroidering the dark city, the neat lines of roofs, the uprising of spires, looking like the background cut from black velvet for a puppet shadow-play. Then Hook beckoned them on, they traversed a narrow path alongside a high stone wall with a head-turning drop off the bluff on the other side, worked a postern gate open, and finally emerged into the cathedral courtyard, under the high clock tower with its elegant cupola capped in patinaed green. They crept around to the triple-arched portico on the right, and Will knelt down with a pair of slender wires in hand and applied his professional skill. Shortly thereafter, they were inside.

Emma's first impression was of overwhelming _space –_ great and echoing, forests of stone like frozen, filigreed lace, pouring in a waterfall and arrested in time just before it struck the floor. The great rose window behind them twinkled dimly, as well as the sea of half-burned white candles that stood in wooden racks to the rear of the sanctuary, nestled among pictures of saints and worn rosaries, prayers for the souls of the humble dead. Emma and Will were about to hurry past it, but surprising them both, Killian stopped, dipped his fingers in the bowl of holy water, and crossed himself. Then taking a taper, he lit one of the candles and placed it carefully among its fellows, watching it for a long moment. The glow lit an odd look in his eyes, and Emma was taken aback. The pirate had not struck her as a godly man, though she had seen the silver crucifix he wore, and it might not be a bad idea to pray for success, if that was what he was doing – though she suspected God, if He did exist, was liable to take a very dim view of the miscreants in His house. She lingered, tempted to pull on Killian's sleeve and summon him back to earth. They didn't have time to waste.

"Oy, mate," Will hissed, evidently thinking the same thing. "Let's keep movin', eh?"

Killian started, frowned at them, then shook his head, dismissing the reverie. As they moved into the narrow transept that paralleled the nave, Emma whispered, "What was that for?"

"My mother." He didn't look at her. "She'd have wanted it. And I – I was raised Catholic. So much as I was raised anything."

That once more came as an unexpected insight, one that Emma did not much want – and yet she could not keep back that pang of curiosity and almost sympathy, wondering who he was. After all, he hadn't been born Captain Hook, nemesis of the Empire, but must have become so in desperate circumstances. She remembered what Will had said earlier, about the ghosts of his dead brother and dead lover, wondered if it was just them that he had lost. Enough to make a straight-laced young Navy lieutenant abandon everything he had ever believed in, and emerge only determined to destroy and destroy, to make up for the black abyss in his chest where his heart had been.

Emma was the one who had to snap herself back to the present this time, looking around. The candles and the glow from the stained-glass windows provided just enough light to transform absolute darkness to grey-black gloaming, to see the fluted columns towering up to the ogives braided far above, across the ceiling. The high altar stood at the far end, like some great sculpted angel watching them, and Emma had to firmly repress a shudder. Not that, not anything, just –

They turned the corner, down into the croft that led to the vaults, and she almost screamed.

Only long practice enabled her to bite her tongue in time, and Hook's hand gripping her arm hard. As the first shock receded, she saw that they were statues, just statues, which the government, evidently thinking them an effective deterrence to the dim-witted, had paid several penny-dreadful sorts of artists a handsome sum to sculpt. The nearest was a chimera, or at least Emma _thought_ that was what it was supposed to be; the monster looked only as if it had eaten something disagreeable and was suffering riotous flatulence. Its clawed fists each clasped a goggle-eyed sinner, done fashionably in bronze, and a cadre of outraged cherubim, hovered nearby, venting their fat cheeks into reprobating trumpet blasts. Very Last Judgment, she supposed, or perhaps a warning of what happened to ye who ventured here (abandon all hope, indeed). All sorts of things must lie hidden in St. Vitus' depths. Prague _was_ renowned for its magical knowledge and power – was the headquarters of the famed and feared sorcerers' guild, the Bavarian Illuminati, the only real rival the Royal Society still had – and where better place to hide all the things rival magicians craved most desperately to get their hands on, but the one where they could not go? It gave Emma a chill to think of everything that might be down there. _And if it gets stolen from at last, will that open the floodgates?_

She stood tensely, not wanting to turn her back on the statues, amateurish as they were, as Will and Killian inspected the apparently unprepossessing grate that guarded the entrance to the vaults. A pure and perfect darkness breathed out of it, the cold black air of the grave and the deep sepulcher, and Emma felt the hairs rising on her arms and the back of her neck. _I do not want to go down there._

Oblivious to her unease, Will and Killian conversed in hushed whispers that nonetheless sounded, to Emma's panicky brain, as loud as a shout. As Will crouched in front of the grate, apparently to resume his lock-picking duties, Killian glanced back at her. "All right, love?"

"Fine." She certainly was not about to reveal any weakness to him. "Why don't I – I stay up here and keep watch?"

The pirate gave her a long look. "Keep watch, or run to fetch the guards on us?"

Emma flushed, angry at how easily he had read her. "I had no intention of any such thing," she lied. "But it seems counterproductive to send all three of us down there together."

"We've come this far." He shrugged. "Don't worry, love. I'll protect you."

She was on the verge of another tart retort, but it abruptly died on her tongue. This place _was_ unnerving her, he clearly was not about to take the risk of leaving her behind to do a bunk, and she made no protest as he took her arm and escorted her nearer, not quite letting go as they watched Will at his work. The bright _ching!_ of his instruments against the metal made Emma wince again, glancing around. She had the oddest sensation that the statues were moving behind her back the instant she took her eyes off them, but that was just her imagination.

It took Will quite a bit longer than it had to obtain entrance to the cathedral, but finally, he eased the grate open, revealing a narrow stairway down into the darkness. They had passed the tombs of several Holy Roman Emperors and other luminaries on their way in, and Emma wondered if someone or some _thing_ else was interred down here – again not a thought of particular comfort, and she instinctively leaned into Killian's warmth. As much as she was well aware of what and who they were to each other, he at least was alive, and more or less interested in her welfare. She thought of what else Will had said earlier, about him fancying her, then dismissed that as well. It was just manipulation, the same as she was trying to do to him.

"Right," Will breathed. "Onwards and upwards, then? Or downwards?"

"Aye." Killian's hand fell to his sword hilt, loosening it a few tugs in the scabbard, and then he offered it to Emma, helping her down onto the first step. With Will coming after them, pulling the grate closed but not locking it, they began the descent.

It had been quiet in the sanctuary to start, but Emma noticed how quickly all sounds utterly fell away, as if gulped up by the mouth of some great beast; even their footfalls barely echoed. They had almost no light, having not dared to bring a lamp, and had to grope along by touch, her body pressed close alongside Killian's as they continued to wind into the bowels of the cathedral. Whenever she came close to losing her balance, he steadied her, and she was clinging to him more than she wanted to admit. Will came along behind them, which was better than having nothing there.

As her eyes slowly began to adjust to the blackness, Emma could make out faint contours of ancient stone, which might have been first laid here in the cathedral's great buildings in the fourteenth century. Here and there was an arch close over their heads, flickers in the shadows, skittering that might have been rats. She _hoped_ they were rats, at least. The stairwell was opening up into a low, dank earthen passage, stumps of torches still burning in iron sconces. Even that amount of light made her squint and wince, blinking hard.

"Bloody hell," Will whispered, emerging after them and glancing to all sides. "Your terrifying friend give us any helpful bits about where to start lookin'?"

"More or less," Killian answered abstractedly, still holding onto Emma as she huddled against his chest. God, it was cold down here. The air was heavy and thick and damp, biting right through her cloak, and it was starting to make her teeth chatter. She hoped this wouldn't take very long, could feel a sensation like insects crawling all over her, gooseflesh stippling her skin. "We've got to keep going."

With that, the three burglars continued to tromp down the underground corridor, Will also sticking closer to Killian than strictly necessary; Emma was encouraged to see that at least she wasn't the only one feeling adversely affected by this bloody spooky place. As for Killian himself, if he was unnerved, he didn't show it. They reached a wooden door at the end, which he pushed through, and into another, smaller chamber. The ceiling was low enough here that even Emma had to duck, and they scuttled along, bent double, as it funneled into a serpentine labyrinth. Still so quiet. Not that this was, per se, a bad thing. It was better than the alternative, at least. Not as if she _wanted –_

"That." Emma froze. Was certain she'd heard something _–_ or rather, someone. Someone screaming. "What was that?"

"Didn't hear anything, love." Killian tugged her alongside him. "Come on."

Since it was hardly as if she had another option, Emma let him, though she had to admit a growing resentment at him for leading them here in the first place. _Though if what Gold wanted was down here, and he promised me I could have everything by finding it, I can't say I'd do any differently._ She still didn't know exactly what it was they were looking for, but thinking of the golem's eye that Gold had showed her back at the Athanaeum Club, she did have a sinking suspicion. Will had said that Jafar would be able to hold all of Prague for ransom, if he had the possibility of unleashing a murderous clay giant on them at any time. _What have we gotten ourselves into?_

Just as Emma was musing on the oddity that it was indeed _we,_ the three of them having to work together to get out of this, a sensation like a silent lightning bolt ripped through her from head to heel, and before she knew what had happened, she was on her knees, gasping for air, and Killian – who had been gripping her hand tightly when it struck – was kneeling over her. "Jesus. Jesus! Swan? Emma? Are you all right, love?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" she muttered, rubbing a hand over her face and trying to stop shaking. She tried to get back to her feet, but her knees were water, and he caught her before she could fall again. She felt as she had on the ship, right after she had done whatever she'd done to save it and put it back together, as if something had erupted out of her with a force too great to be controlled or contained. Her fingertips felt hot, and when she looked at them, she could see them gently spitting fat, floating golden sparks into the air. "I – let's – just – go."

"Aye, if you say so." He still looked concerned, as she hung tightly onto his arm and they started forward again.

"Where's Will?" she asked, trying to distract herself. "He didn't – "

"No idea. I stopped to see to you, he must have gone ahead to scout the passage. Have to be almost there."

This was welcome news to Emma, getting out of here as soon as possible, and it made her quicken her pace. They turned the corner and entered another narrow bottleneck, but the passage, oddly, seemed to be sloping _up_ under their feet. Another few yards, and she was certain of it. There was also a breath of fresh air ghosting across her face, clean and cold, that didn't smell like the mold of the crofts, and she moved instinctively toward it.

The passage ended in another set of stairs, and she and Killian – she realized just then that they had forgotten to stop holding hands, but she'd get around to that later – exchanged a glance, then started up them. "Will?" Killian called. "Oy, you up there?"

The words echoed, but no answer came. Yet Emma grew increasingly sure that she could in fact hear voices – not angry ones, but indeed happy ones, and something that sounded like singing. The closer they climbed to the surface, the more she was convinced. And then they emerged in a dark culvert with a grate at the end, pushed it aside, stepped out, outside – and stared.

When they had entered the cathedral, it had been a chilly autumn night at the end of September, Michaelmas eve. Now, snow cloaked the quaint houses and towers of the city, more falling swiftly in the light of the streetlamps, and every window glowed with welcoming cheer. Sleigh and church bells chimed silver in the distance, and wreaths and other festive ornaments were hung at doors and posts. Emma could see several decorated pine trees, of the sort that Queen Victoria and _The Illustrated London News,_ reporting on the ones set up in Windsor Castle,had popularized in London quite recently – but those were for Christmas! They couldn't – how could they –

She was starting to shiver, even in her cloak. Killian was already peeling off his black leather jacket and draping it around her shoulders, as he had on the ship, and she didn't refuse it, too dazed, as they glanced around. "Where are we?" she stammered.

"The same place we were before, love. Prague. Just. . . seems there was a wrinkle of some sort." Jones did not look as worried as she felt; in fact, a small, almost sweet smile was pulling at his lip. "I'm sure we can find our way back. But we don't have to go right away, eh?"

"What do you mean?" She trotted after him to the courtyard gate, as he opened it and they passed through the castle complex and down to the street on the far side. Heavily bundled carolers whizzed past in gales of good cheer, and men in ragged coats were wheeling barrows of roasted chestnuts. The chocolatier on the corner was doing a booming business, and several folk hailed them cheerily in Czech, to which Killian responded with a few polite words. Emma's head was turning in every direction, still trying to fathom how they had ended up in the middle of a picture-perfect Bavarian Christmas. What had _happened_ down there?

Killian stopped to admire a nutcracker in the window of a woodworker's shop, _Drosselmeyer & Son _swinging over the door. His expression was now so openly nostalgic that Emma had to ask. "What is going _on?_ Why are you so _happy_ about this?"

"I've no bloody idea what's going on, love. As I said, we'll sort it out in a bit. But I. . ." Killian paused, then turned to her seriously. "I was here for Christmas, a long time ago. 1835, I think. I was sixteen. My. . . my brother had gotten leave for the holidays, we'd spent all year abroad, and he decided to surprise me. We went to Prague, and he bought me a nutcracker just like this. It was the first time I'd ever had a real, frivolous Christmas present, his gifts tended to run to the devastatingly practical. It's. . . it's one of my happiest memories."

Emma was surprised, but once more able to see, despite herself, how he would be in no haste to run away from it, might want to steal a few more sweet moments out of it, lie or otherwise. "Your brother?" she prodded gently. Didn't want to reveal that she knew his name, from reading the dispatches on the _Jewel of the Realm-_ turned- _Jolly Roger_ in her preliminary research.

"Aye." Killian seemed to realize he'd said too much, and clammed up, but kept glancing around, looking and looking as if he could not get enough. "God," he said, half to himself. "Everything looks exactly as I remember it."

For some reason, that piqued Emma's hackles. "I'm sure it does," she said. "I'm sure it was lovely. But we should get back to the cathedral now. We still have – our mission."

"Aye, of course." Killian was still glancing around as he followed her reluctantly, their footsteps leaving indents in the fresh snow as they climbed back up the street. It wound around, getting tangled up in the countless side lanes, and she must have taken a wrong turn, because they emerged back into the street with the nutcracker in the window and the barrow-man with his chestnuts, his hot iron brazier setting the cold air rippling. She frowned, started back, and kept on going straight, in the way she knew they'd come from the cathedral, and indeed could see its great twin black-iron steeples rising into the wintry darkness. She quickened her pace, lifted her skirts out of the snow –

– and stepped into the same street again.

Emma stopped dead, her suspicion finally wakened to full-blown flame. "Hook," she hissed. "I think we're going in circles."

"Nonsense, we were just there." Killian frowned as well. "Come, I know this place, we'll take a different route. Follow me."

Emma did. They climbed up the side street, emerged onto a narrow dead man's walk lined with candles, the snowflakes catching in her hair and landing elegantly on his shoulders; he must be cold without the jacket, but gave no sign. She hurried to stay close to him, as they stepped up onto a winding stair, started the ascent, and at the top –

Stepped out. Into the same street.

This time, even Killian noticed it, and a frown drew his dark brows sharp. He put out a hand for her, drawing her automatically into his side, and she tucked herself against him, all her pleasure – and his – in the idyllic scene completely evaporated. She didn't know where they were, or when they were, or _what_ they were. If they'd entered some kind of demented dream loop or memory or hallucination, if they had never left the cathedral at all, if they were even awake. But one thing was inevitably, perfectly clear.

They were completely trapped.


	10. Chapter 10

Will had just rounded the corner when his companions vanished off the face of the earth, as matter-of-factly as if they had merely stepped out to see a man about a dog. There hadn't even been a sound, a hair out of place. Just that one moment he'd heard their footsteps following, and then he hadn't. He peered suspiciously round the bank of the passage, half-expecting the Captain to pop out like the world's worst jack-in-a-box and have himself an ill-gotten laugh at Will's expense, but no. Nothing. Hook and his fetching female companion – Emma Swan, would that be the Black Swan, and _that_ was a new wrinkle and not one he liked – were simply and absolutely gone, with no sign apart from the trampled mud to indicate that anyone had ever been there. Will grabbed a half-burned torch from a sconce and swept it from side to side, throwing darting firelit shadows over the crooks and crannies of the crypt, but everywhere he turned, the situation remained the same. They were not here. Not anywhere.

A cold grue ran down Will's back. Much as he and the Captain were having a bit of a rough patch, he suddenly discovered that his animosity toward Killian Jones did not extend to wishing him devoured without a trace in the depths of a dangerous and haunted vault – but if that was how the place defended itself against magical intruders, why the devil had it taken _him?_ Before leaving the boarding house, both Killian and Will had taken scrupulous care to divest their persons of anything remotely magical – even the ring that Killian used to alert the _Roger_ of his location in case of emergency, such as how they had escaped from the Tower. Not that the ship and the crew, if they had obeyed orders, would be anywhere near Prague anyway, but it was a reminder of how much they, non-magical to the bone, nonetheless relied on it in daily life. As for Emma, she insisted that she didn't have magic, or if she had, she didn't anymore, having used it in one great burst to save the _Roger_ (with an extremely pointed look at Killian, as if to remind him that he owed her a rather large favor for that). But if she'd been wrong, and then walked straight into the defensive nexus holding Jones' hand (as she had done the entire time they were down here, as if afraid the other one might fall off too if she let go) it could have gulped up her, and by extension him. So, at least, was how Will could reckon it.

He hesitated, wondering whether he'd see either of them ever again. But surely it was a great waste to just destroy magical artifacts and people, especially when the Illuminati would want to personally examine them and see if they were useful. Hence, the Captain and Miss Swan were very likely still alive – but if so, where? And was it Will's duty to risk his own neck trying to rescue them (they _had_ gotten him out of the Tower, an unwelcome little voice reminded him) or to carry out their original mission: finding and stealing the _shem?_ If the bloody golem-animating enchanted scroll was even really why that bastard Jafar had sent them down here. Will had cleverly worked out the identity of Killian's mysterious patron (all right, Smee's big mouth had had a thing or two to do with it) and maintained a more-than-robust suspicion of him. Will hadn't heard much about the fellow, it was true, but what he _had_ heard went sprinting past "bad" and dove straight into "trousers-shittingly terrifying."

Right then. With no other apparent option, Will started to walk. The torch was burning quite low, and he could feel the heat searing his skin, but he didn't want to drop it; once he did, he was in total darkness. He thought he had heard some kind of sound again, over in thataway direction, and while it was not ordinarily a sound he would like to get closer to, his present circumstances overrode his qualms. He picked and pottered his way through the passage, free hand extended to grope for obstacles, hearing that faint, high keen that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, like a wounded animal or a woman screaming. _Emma?_ And where he found her, he was likely (or so he hoped, at least) to find the Captain.

Will sped up, fingers burning until he swore and shook the scalding embers off his hand, blundering and barking his shins and crashing into every wall there was and likely some that weren't. He couldn't have made more noise if he'd tipped over a bloody tinker's cart, and imagined that the priests and canons and rectors of St. Vitus' were waking in their beds to complain of it (followed by sending an inquisitorial squad down here to root out the infidel and hang him by his thumbs). Yet despite the torch's inconsiderate decease, there was a dim, bloody light limning the dark underground catacomb, just enough for him to make his way by – and to see his breath in the air. That was peculiar, but as it was the least of the peculiarities he was presently confronted with, he put it aside. Climbed up one final set of steps, abruptly went down instead as it changed direction, and hopping on his twisted ankle, beheld a vast subterranean chamber like something out of a fever dream – or nightmare.

It towered away into the blackness, dirty columns splashed with nameless ordure, and red, glowing orbs lazily circled the ceiling. Hoarfrost clung to the walls, sparkling like gypsum, and the first thing Will smelled was something strong, raw, earthy – like wet dirt mixed with a burning undercurrent of flame and decay, but that was not all. It was sharp, searing, like fresh-forged silver and the sting of winter air, bracing as brandy and bitter as hemlock. It was the scent of sorcery beyond a doubt, and before him, the apparent source of it, stood an enormous vat.

After a pause, Will moved to investigate its contents. He was almost afraid of what he would see, but it was filled with nothing more sinister than roiling mud. He wondered how much of it there was, and it gave him a shiver to imagine falling through endless fathoms, trapped and suffocating. But while he was still staring slack-jawed at the place and trying to figure out what in sheep-diddling tarnation it was used for, the sound came again, directly opposite him. And then he looked up, over, and got one of the ruder shocks of his life.

The noise that he had thought might have been made by a woman, had indeed been made by one – but not by Emma, though for a split second he thought so. This one was also blonde, a long, thick white-gold braid coming unraveled down her back, clad in the ragged remnants of a nightdress, feet bare and filthy and hands completely covered by iron helmets that were then chained to the wall. On spotting him, her big blue eyes went wide and frightened, then narrow and threatening. " _Hvem er du?"_ she demanded. _"_ _Ikke kom nærmere! Jeg mener. . ._ _Nechoď blíž!_ _"_

Will, for whom foreign languages had never been a forte, responded hopefully, "Bonjour?"

" _Parlez-vous Français?"_ she asked, switching effortlessly into that tongue, the lingua franca of all the courts of Europe. Educated, then, and almost certainly highborn as well. _"Vous at-il envoyer ici? Que veut-il de moi_ _?"_

"Er. . ." Killian was the one good at this sort of thing, not him; the captain spoke enough to trade at almost all their usual ports of call, from Madrid to Milan. The only other French phrase Will knew was "ce salaud a volé mon argent," or "that bastard stole my money," which was singularly unlikely to be useful in the current situation. "Anglais?"

"Yes." She tensed like a cornered cat. "I am warning you, don't come any closer. If you're working for him, I'll – I'll have to hurt you."

Will was somewhat incredulous at the idea that she could do anyone much harm, but he was so relieved that they had finally found common linguistic ground that he decided to overlook it. "I'm not," he said, which was only half a lie. He briefly speculated who "he" was, but had a distinct sinking feeling that he already knew. In which case, yes he was, but not for the reasons she thought. "Who're you, then?"

She bristled at his apparently too-informal address. _"I,_ peasant, am Elsa of the House Bernadotte, Queen of Norway and Sweden. And _you_ are?"

 _Oh, bloody hell._ Will had naïvely assumed that this could not get any worse, but he had apparently been wrong. He was dumbfounded. Gold's minions had been discussing the plot to kidnap this very woman, as he and Killian had overheard at the Tower – but how, _how_ had Jafar already known about it, acted well in advance to neatly undercut them, and pounced in to steal the queen himself? He'd have to have some sort of incredibly well-placed sneak in Gold's very household, with intimate access to the magician's most secret plans and inclinations. But Gold, who (not without reason) was as paranoid as a deposed dictator living in exile on St. Helena, would surely have sniffed them out first thing. Unless. . .

Will frowned. He couldn't put his finger on it, not quite, but he was beginning to grasp an inkling. Jafar's initial condition for employment had been that they (or rather he, because of bloody course) steal the compass from the Great Exhibition. A trivial item, they had all thought at the time. But what if he'd done something with it, created a copy – and then seen to it that that one fell back into Gold's hands? That was the tale Will had heard when the peelers were reading him the riot act, when they told him they had discovered the fake compass and wanted the real one back. Jafar could be using the counterfeit to spy on Gold, some sort of two-way conduit with the real one, and hence half a dozen steps ahead of his rival at the bare minimum. Would know not only exactly what Gold intended to do, but how to checkmate him before he even got there. If so, this was. . . this was. . .

Her Majesty, however, was still waiting on an answer. "Well? Who are you?"

"Will, m'lady. Will Scarlet. I'm a thief," he added idiotically. "How d'you do?"

"A thief?" she repeated. "And that will be useful to me how?"

It was Will's turn to bristle. "Oy. I've got plenty of experience pickin' locks, could likely get you out of there. When you need someone to save your arse, you don't exactly ask for his family tree and coat of arms first."

"I – don't – need – _saving."_ She wrestled ineffectually at the chains. "I had this all under control before – "

"Don't look that way to me. I was in a similar pinch recently. Once you get your rump in the air, you'll be doin' as well as I did."

She glared at him. "You talk too much."

"So I've heard. But I don't work for – for him. I'm lookin' for someone. Two someones, actually. Dark-haired fellow with a black leather jacket and a bad attitude, sort of face you'd want to punch if you saw it, and another lovely blonde lady. Bit like you. You seen 'em?"

"No." Elsa stopped struggling, but still regarded him with rankest mistrust. "You're the only person I've seen in days."

"Well. Seems maybe we could be useful to each other." Without waiting for her permission, he stepped forward, pulled out the wires he'd used to finagle the cathedral lock, and started industriously on her cuffs. "How'd you even end up like this, anyway?"

"Oh, I have a suspicion," Elsa said through gritted teeth. "Prince Hans of Denmark. He didn't approve of my aether embargo, and traveled personally to my court to tell me so. Then again, he's been making money hand over fist in backroom black-market deals with the Royal Society, it's no wonder he'd react badly to having that threatened. As well, he still bitterly resents us for my sister Anna breaking off her engagement to him. So I suppose he put the word out that he could deliver me to the highest bidder, and J – my current captor got there first. I should have been expecting it, but they struck in the dead of night while the palace was sleeping, captured me, and took me here." Her lip trembled, but only slightly. "I don't know what he wants."

"Nothing good, I'll reckon. And this Prince Hans sounds a right bastard. Something rotten in the state of, eh?"

Elsa looked surprised. "You can _read?"_

"Course I can read," Will snapped. "Always thought Hamlet was a bit of a tosser, myself."

She made an odd noise that might have been intended to conceal a laugh, and held still as he laboriously worked at the chains. It was the hell of a job, but he finally got them loose, sliding one iron cage off her hand, then the other. He was curious as to why they'd been locked up so carefully in the first place; was she going to turn into a harpy and claw his eyes out? She displayed no signs of transforming into an avian man-hating menace, however, so he was safe enough. She staggered as he undid the ankle fetters, and he reached out a hand to steady her, but she flinched back. "Don't touch me."

"Hey now, I might be a bloody lowborn thief, but I'm not an evil arsehole who farts around rapin' women for fun and jollies, so if you – "

"That's not what I mean. Not exactly." She hugged her arms to her chest. "I'm dangerous. Trust me."

"Oh," Will said, politely dubious. He pulled back the arm he had been about to offer her, and they proceeded side by side, carefully not touching, to the enormous vat of mud, staring down into its murky depths. "What d'you think it's for? Jafar's openin' a spa, maybe?"

Elsa shot him a very sharp look. "You _do_ know him."

"Only secondhand. Never met the chap meself."

She uttered a short, mirthless laugh. "Good. Don't."

This piece of advice was not the thing to assuage Will's deep misgivings about who Killian, the bloody idiot, had attached himself to, and he was about to say so. But just then, he was distracted by the sight of something stirring under the surface, as if a monster had awoken in the deep and was swimming up to them. Not a feeling Will much cared for, especially in this place, and he was on the point of turning to Elsa and voicing his opinion that they should skedaddle forthwith – where, he had no idea, just not here. But he never got the chance. That was when the giant clay hand burst out with an explosion of filth, got him by the leg, and hauled him violently upside down into the air, shaking him like a dog with a bird in its jaws.

Will screamed. Elsa screamed, which sounded remarkably similar to his, and dodged away. She raised both hands, and Will didn't catch exactly what she did, but he felt a frozen blast of something scrape past his face, saw the hand thrashing madly as it was encased in a wintry carapace of magic, icicles bearding and breaking off with a tremendous clatter. It didn't stop the monster, only slow it, and snowflakes were beginning to fall thickly from the low stone ceiling. Steam billowed up where the icy jets struck the hot mud, hissing and popping, and Elsa was backing up, hitting it with more torrents of magic as she went. She appeared set to turn and run, leaving him to his literally shitty fate, but he bellowed, "OY!"

She glanced up at him as if only just remembering he was there, then aimed a surgically accurate blast at the fingers poking and prodding at places where fingers were not supposed to go (at least not unless you'd asked nicely and had a good wine and a bit of snogging first) and froze it solid. It trembled, then burst into a thousand glittering, lethally sharp shards, and Will barely managed to torque himself out of the way as he plunged headlong. He broke his fall and rolled on the floor, then sprang to his feet, ready to continue the battle if need be, but the mud had subsided into glorping, bubbling retreat. He eyed it evilly, still breathing hard, then wheeled toward Elsa. "The bloody hell was that?"

She was even paler than before, but her voice was level. "A golem. A nearly finished one, by the looks of things. The ones crafted from dark magic are given life by the blood of many people, not just their creator's. Once it had the final sacrifice and received the _shem_ and the controlling eye _,_ it would be fully alive. . . and unstoppable."

Well, this just kept getting better and better. Something occurred to Will just then. "You're a. . . you're a magical sort of person, you know? So your blood would be far more powerful than the average bloke's. Make the golem a hundred times stronger than usual, and with your freezing magic to boot. If you were intended to be the final sacrifice, and Jafar had got the _shem_ from whatever nitwit would be thick enough to give it to him. . ."

He didn't need to complete the sentence, as it was hideously apparent to both of them that this was the case. He didn't know if Jafar had a golem's eye in his possession, the last thing he appeared to need in order to unloose his reign of murderously muddy terror, but it would be a fool who bet against him. The golem lacked form and sentience without it, but as Will had just learned at unpleasantly close range, it was already more than formidable. Damn, and Killian had been just planning to trot down here, steal the _shem,_ and hand it over, not a care in the world. . .

Will was beginning to feel ever more like a rat in a trap. Still more, he noted something queer about the icicles: they weren't stopping. They were continuing to grow and sharpen and multiply, as more frost raced up the walls and enclosed the vault to all sides, the temperature dropping even more steeply. "You!" he shouted. "Turn it off!"

"I'm trying!" Elsa's voice sounded high and hysterical. The snow was falling faster. "I'm _trying!"_

"How'd you do it before?" Will slipped on the accumulated flakes and nearly fell flat on his arse, which would just put a damn cherry on the day's humiliation sundae. "Was it some other spell, or – "

"Anna, my sister, she – " The cords in Elsa's slender neck strained as she fought the elemental fury with all her strength. "I can't be sure if she's alive or dead – though if I know Hans in the least, he's holding her hostage – and forced her to sign an agreement naming him regent during this terrible crisis – he'll announce to the world – that it was a tragic accident – their dearly beloved queen's untimely death – "

"And you think anyone will _believe_ that?"

"Of course they won't! But Hans has the Royal Society behind him – no one will dare ask too many questions! So even if Robert Gold loses me – he wins!"

Fascinating as this all was, and it was very fascinating indeed, Will still did not see what it had the least thing to do with stopping the swiftly worsening blizzard. So he did the only thing that seemed sensible. He skated forward, grabbed her around the waist, and heaved her over his shoulder, stumbling madly for the door. Where could he go – where could _they_ go – they couldn't go back the way he'd come, otherwise they would walk into the same trap that had claimed the Captain and Emma, and they couldn't be sure that there wasn't another one lurking somewhere. His brain whirled madly, only coming up with more blinding white panic. Or maybe that was the snow. It was hard to tell them apart by now.

"Put me _down!"_ Elsa beat on his back with her fists, sending small, freezing jolts through him, which was just addin' insult to injury. "Otherwise you'll – "

"With all due respect, Your Highness, stuff it!" Will bellowed, finding the steps by painful accident and bolting up them. "No time to discuss this as a committee!"

"I am _not_ a committee!" she screamed, as they went skidding down the other side and he almost lost his balance, but regained it at the last second, not helped by the kicking royal over his shoulder, who he dumped unceremoniously onto her feet. Normally he wasn't the sort of fellow to absquatulate with struggling women, but desperate times and all that, and he was now quite sure that with the magical alarms well and thoroughly set off down here, pursuit was coming like Cerberus and the hounds of hell. This was going to end soon, and it was going to end very, very messily.

Nonetheless, he didn't intend to go out like a ninny. Nor, for that matter, did he intend to fight if it could be at all avoided. There had to be some way deeper, somewhere they could hide until the tempest blew over. Elsa, forgetting her disdain in her panic, clutched at him as he continued to haul her bodily down the passage. She was clearly dying to shoot off a defensive blast or three, but he pushed her arm down; they could not take that risk. Instead he grabbed her by the hand, whirled her around, and they fled together – down, down, _down,_ into the storm and stone and darkness.

* * *

Emma stood staring at the wintry night until she was finally and depressingly certain that this was no dream – or if it was, it was as real as any waking world. Then, having sorted through all the other options and finding none that made a comparable amount of sense (as much as was presently to be found) she turned to the pirate. "I. . . I think we're in your memory."

"I was thinking something rather the same myself, love." His mouth was grim. "You must have triggered the vault's defenses somehow, and since I was holding onto you, I went along for the ride. But if so, why did we wind up in one of _my_ happiest memories, not yours?"

"I can't really think of any." Some held joy in their own moments, but all of them were tainted by betrayal or misery or heartbreak. "So it had to steal one of yours instead. But I did imagine that something meant to keep intruders out would be more. . . violent." She waved a hand at the merry Christmas Eve streets of Prague from the past. "Not this."

"Works just as well or better, though. People will try anything to escape from somewhere they're being tortured, but if it's pleasant, they'll stay forever on their own accord."

That was quite true, Emma realized, and shuddered. "All right. Let's try this. Just. . . think of St. Vitus as hard as you can, and I'll do my best to. . . to help." If something inside her _had_ launched them here, surely she could reverse it. "Maybe if you're remembering something different, it will cancel this one out and – "

"Intriguing plan, lass." He was still staring down the snowy lane, with the nutcracker in the window and the chestnut seller. "Though I doubt it would be as simple as clicking a pair of enchanted silver shoes together and being whisked back home in a blink."

"Yes, well. We have to try." Emma reached for him. "Ready? One – two – "

As she was starting to say "three," and ginning herself up for whatever dramatic following action she would have to perform, he pulled away from her, leaving her feeling the sudden cold at her side where he had been. He tugged up the dark hood of his cloak, rocked back and forth on his heels, then stepped down off the frosted promenade and started into the city again. Aghast at this turn of events, she galloped after him, hauling on his arm as if to bridle a recalcitrant stallion, the warm glow from the windows – each with a candle in it to light the Christ-child's way – throwing their shadows on the white-glazed cobbles. "Have you lost your mind? We need to get out of here!"

He turned on her with a look so searing it knocked the words from her mouth back down into her stomach. Then his eyes flicked down to where she was still holding his arm, and in that moment, Emma could hear both of them wondering how it had come to this, that neither of them was willing to leave the other behind. She let go as if she'd been scalded, but as she was about to ask something else, Killian went stiff all over, as both of them heard footsteps crunching in the snow.

The next moment, a tall man rounded the corner, his heavy blue riding cloak pinned with what Emma recognized as the emblem of the "Sailor King" – William IV, Queen Victoria's uncle, who had served in the Royal Navy in his youth and always retained a pride and patronage for it. This man wore shiny black boots and a gold-trimmed tricorne over his brown curls, and the light of the lamppost revealed a handsome, broad-boned face and keen blue-grey eyes. A military-issue saber swung from his belt, and his gloves were black leather – a dashing, solid, clean-cut picture of responsibility and order and good form, undeniably there, real, taking up space, his breath huffing in the chilly night air, snow squeaking underfoot. On spotting them, he stopped and called, "Pardon me, will you have seen a lad of sixteen or so running through here? My little brother. I seem to have lost him."

Emma marveled at the fact that they apparently looked so distinctively English that he knew to address them in that language instead of Czech, but she was badly startled by Hook's reaction. He made a choking noise and turned away, going to his knees and covering his face with the cloak. And as she stared at him in confusion and alarm, and then back at the man asking for his sixteen-year-old brother, she understood, so coldly and terribly that it felt as if an avalanche had been set off in her stomach. "I – no," she managed. "I'm afraid we haven't."

Captain Liam Jones looked back at her quizzically, then over at Killian, still on his knees. "I'm sorry, is he quite – ?"

"My husband," Emma lied swiftly. There was no reason to question what a married couple was doing out enjoying the holiday night; anything else would require too much explanation. "He's. . . he's just upset. He lost his brother recently as well."

"I'm terribly sorry," Liam said again, in apparently sincere sympathy. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Not unless you can bring back the dead," Emma said quietly. "Turn back time."

"That _is_ beyond my talents, I am afraid. I do understand, though. I've always thought that if I lost Killian – that's my little brother – I wouldn't be able to go on." Liam hesitated, then shook his head. "Forgive me. You did not ask for me to burden you with my own troubles. But – "

Just then he stopped, frowning at Killian. The light was terrible, and the pirate had mostly covered his face, but Liam bent toward him, brow furrowed. In a very different, strange voice, he said, "Excuse me, but do I. . . do I know you?"

The pirate shook from head to toe, and Emma was possessed with an absurd urge to go to him, to take him in her arms and comfort him, but hastily dismissed it and remained where she was. In a faint, hoarse, cracking voice, Captain Hook whispered, "No. No, you don't."

"I thought. . ." Liam straightened up, still frowning. "It must have been a trick of the light. My pardons, again. You must think me terribly ungentlemanly. But I should be on my way – I need to find Killian, and I suppose think of a Christmas gift for him as well – "

"There," Hook croaked, pointing at the nutcracker in the shop window. "Buy him that."

"Ah. Yes, that would do. I don't have much experience at this." Liam smiled wryly, paused again, then said, "A very merry Christmas to you. To you both."

"And you," Emma answered, wondering as she did why she had. He was just a memory, long-dead, they probably shouldn't even be interacting with him anyway. But she couldn't help herself. It seemed impossible that this man should not exist, that he should be dust and ashes, when he was standing right in front of her, warm and sturdy and solid, breathing on his own. She felt the sibyl's terrible temptation to tell him the hour of his death, that barely two years from now he would be gone and his little brother transformed into a pirate, everything he had ever believed up in smoke. But if she did – if this was more than a memory, was some sort of window into the past – there was no way to know what she might change or destroy. _I can't._ She had thought that the weight, the grief of it, would not be hers, but it was. It was. "It was. . . it was nice to meet you."

Liam nodded graciously, doffed his hat to her, and started off. But then Killian called after him in a sudden, agonized burst of words, as if they had burned out of his very soul. "I love you. _I love you."_

Liam stopped short, understandably taken aback. He stared at the man in black for a long moment. Then he doffed his hat again, rather tersely, and strode away, not running but certainly at a pace that suggested he would prefer to put some distance between himself and the mentally unhinged gentleman. He stepped into the store, purchased the nutcracker, and then was away off the street, vanishing into the snow.

Killian's gaze remained fixed on him until long after he was out of sight, and Emma had the uneasy sense that she might have to physically prevent him from jumping up and following. She had as well the feeling that they had stayed far too long. The cheery Christmas scene now seemed to possess a tangible threat, shadows stealing over the candles and lights and quenching them, the buildings losing form and clarity, becoming distorted and grotesque. The bells no longer sounded sweet and clear, but harsh, discordant, sinister. "Hook," she said urgently, grabbing his shoulder and shaking it, as if to wake him from deep sleep. "Hook, we have to get out of here. _Now."_

He stared up at her with eyes heavy and hazy with pain, living through the agony of loss all over again. "Aye, lass. We should."

"Come on." Emma got on her knees, facing him. The skittering and rustling was getting louder, and she caught sight of something that looked distinctly like the chimera statue that had been guarding the entrance to the vault – the one she had thought looked so ridiculous, with its bronze sinners and its bad case of the farts. _They are coming for us._ "Look at me. This is your memory. For us to get out of here, you have to let it go. It's the only way. You have to. Come on. Give it up. _Now!"_

He lifted hand and hook as if they were both made of lead, offering them to her, and she snatched them. He never took his eyes off her, watching her with the same searing intensity as he had watched his brother, and she could feel it to the heart. It made something deep and hot and powerful spark to life inside her, and she concentrated as hard as she could. Just enough to get them out of here – just _enough –_

For a final moment more, she felt as if she was bashing on a massive, unyielding slab of glass with her fists, but could neither crack it nor even budge it. Then all at once it exploded, and the world went up in flames around them, the only real thing their anchorage to each other, as they were tossed and whirled and thrown down the maelstrom, falling and falling and falling. He grabbed her, pulling her into his body, and the next instant they crashed into a stone floor with bone-cracking force. He took most of the impact, not her, but they both lay there, choking and retching and gulping, sobbing for air, seeing stars, piled up and hopelessly entangled.

At long length, when she was finally satisfied that her lungs were not going to burst out of her chest, Emma sat up. They were in some dark, cramped undercroft, the ceiling not even high enough for them to stand – and for a stomach-lurching moment, she thought they had not escaped at all. Snowflakes were sifting lightly from the groins, speckling her face and hands with cool wintry kisses. But why on _earth – ?_

Her question was answered the very next instant. Footsteps echoed madly in the corridor, and then none other than Will Scarlet himself, an unfamiliar, ragged blonde woman in tow, burst in, saw them, and screeched to a halt so astonished that in any other circumstances it would have been comic, eyes bugging out as he windmilled his arms frantically. The blonde woman ran into him from the back, and they clutched each other and did a crazy little dance attempting to regain their balance. "What – who – "

"Who the hell is this?" said almost everyone else in the room.

"Long story," Will panted. "What in the – bloody _hell,_ Jones, I thought – "

Hearing himself thus summoned, Killian rolled over painfully and pushed to his feet. "Well?" he barked at his sidekick. "Have you found it?"

Will blinked. "The – the whatsit? No, but – Killian, listen. It's the bloody statues chasing after us. The ones from the entrance to the vault. They're alive. And the golem isn't a bluff. It's real. If Jafar actually raises that thing, it's going to be hell and – "

Killian appeared to have latched onto only one part of this. "The statues," he repeated, an awful realization dawning on his face. "You said they're alive. And the magic of the _shem_ animates things made from clay – or from stone."

"Mate, listen – "

"I know where it is." The pirate's eyes had gone feverish, almost opaque. "I know where the damn thing is!"

Will stared at him in horror and tried to say something, but then all four of them had to sprint to the far side of the chamber, and out into the longer, high-ceilinged tomb beyond, as the roof began to sway and shatter overhead. Ducking chunks of falling rock, coughing on the dust, they ran hell-for-leather toward the heavy wooden door at the far side – but never reached it. It burst into splinters, and the statues poured in like great living chesspieces, drawing stone swords and swinging stone fists, the chimera leading the charge. It did not look at all funny now. The floor shook and groaned under the blows of their massive footfalls, as they drew a tighter and tighter circle around the four intruders. Killian was grappling for his sword, but it would be no use against them. Nothing but –

At that moment, Emma and the other woman locked eyes. Acting on an unspoken agreement, they flung themselves forward and grabbed hands, feeling a mutual blaze of power surge through them. Glittering blades of ice and fountains of golden fire erupted from their clasped fingers like the manifestation of an archangel with a heavenly sword, scouring the chamber in uncontrollable waves of magic. As the men stood dumbly rooted to the spot, the women channeled as much as they possibly could, until Emma felt turned inside out and about to be violently sick, her bones burning like red-hot iron and her teeth rattling in her skull like a gypsy's runes. Just as she felt that she had to let go or die, the madness cut out, sucked as if down an invisible drain, and she sank in what felt like slow motion to her knees. _I can't keep doing this. It's going to kill me. I can't. It's burning me away._

A thunderous, ringing silence reigned. Killian and Will stood side by side with identical blank expressions of shock, hair smoking slightly. Then they said in perfect and heartfelt unison, "Bloody _hell."_

Breathing hard, the other woman glanced over at the captain. "Queen Elsa of Norway and Sweden," she said coolly. "Pleasure."

Killian's expression took on several further degrees of stupefaction, which was difficult, but he managed. Then Elsa turned away, surveying the motionless statues, which had been varnished with a glittering silver-gold shell. She walked up to the chimera, reached into its mouth, and pulled out a thick, old roll of parchment, inscribed with cabbalistic symbols in something that could only be blood. "Here," she said. "Is this what you're looking for?"

"Aye." Killian seemed to come out of his trance. "Give it here, Your Highness."

Elsa paused, but then started toward him, the precious _shem_ in hand. And in the instant before she reached him, Emma had the overwhelming instinct to shout a warning – but it caught in her throat.

Fast as a snake, Captain Hook struck, ripping the _shem_ out of her grasp and making it vanish into his jacket with the swiftest, most ruthless sleight of hand that could be imagined. Elsa started on the beginnings of a scream, but he pressed his thumb to a vein in her neck, and she collapsed as if she'd been hit over the head. It happened so quickly that neither Will nor Emma had any time to react, but the former recovered first. "Have you – _have you lost your goddamn bloody mind?!"_

"No." Hook stared at them down the two long, empty tunnels of his eyes, as he hoisted Elsa's limp body over his shoulder. "Come on. We're leaving."

"What – no. Killian, bloody hell, don't do this. Don't." Will was almost pleading. "For once, mate. You still can. Do the right thing, and – "

That, however, was the worst thing he could have said. "The right thing?" the pirate repeated, lip curling. "You mean the thing that whenever I _have_ done it, has brutally and utterly fucked me over? I've just been reminded of how much I lost, how much has been stolen from me, and Jafar, whatever else he is or does, can give it back. So yes. I am delivering the queen and the _shem_ to him, straightaway. As soon as we return to the boarding house and fetch my ring, call the _Roger,_ we are going to Monaco."


	11. Chapter 11

There was a very long, very horrible pause. Then Will stepped in front of the ruins of the door, crossed his arms, and said, "No."

Hook looked at him lividly. "I beg your pardon?"

"You bloody well heard me the first time." The young thief was not a tall man, but he drew himself up threateningly as Emma watched, still recovering her breath after the eventful past few minutes. "Now put her down, before I make you."

"Get out of my way, Scarlet."

"No. No, I don't ruddy well think I will. I'm not a piece of furniture that you can lug around when it suits you and throw in the rubbish tip when you get tired of it. I'm a person. So's she. So's both of 'em. We're people. All those folk across Europe who've never done a damn thing to you, who will more n' likely die if you give Jafar the ability to raise the golem, they're people too. Just because you're sad that somebody you loved bit the dust, everyone else has to bite it as well, eh? You filthy, arrogant, selfish, vile _git."_

The pirate recoiled as if the words had physically struck him, but the crack in his composure was gone almost at once. "What the hell do you know about this?"

"Oh, what do I know?" Will bellowed, finally provoked beyond all restraint. _"What do I know?_ Well then. Let me tell you a few bloody things. My father was a drunkard, got run over by some fancy gentleman's coach-and-six in Piccadilly, and while they were scrapin' him off the cobbles, all the gentleman was complainin' about was how 'those people' had the audacity to be out of the East End where they bloody well belonged. I don't remember it, I was four. What I do remember is my mum coughin' herself to death of consumption, doin' the laundry for rich folk and trying desperately not to get blood on the linens, otherwise they'd take it out of her wages. I knew she was gone when I woke up that morning in the dead of bloody winter and it was silent, there wasn't no coughing. Me and Penny weren't big enough to carry her out and see her decently done by, and we were terrified to besides, once the slum lords knew she'd snuffed it, they'd throw us out on the street. So I went to the neighbor-lads, and they took her and sold her to the damn spooks, the body-snatchers. God knows where she went, cut up on some doctor's table or summat. And you think we ever saw a ha'penny of that money? No! Bloody no!"

Hook opened his mouth, but Will bulled over him. "Then when we did get chucked out anyway, I was the only reason we didn't starve. There was plenty of pimps who said they'd take Penny to a house where she'd be well cared for, but I know what goes on in those places for men who like little girls, and over me own dead body was she endin' up there. So I pushed a costermonger's barrow for hours in the rain and wet, sold papers, worked as a chimney-lark because the sweeps hired boys to crawl down the flues and scrape out the soot 'til their fingers bled. But all of it was worth it because Penny thought I was the best in the world, would be so delighted when I got to our shack with whatever pitiful scraps I'd scavenged up for dinner. She'd eat them all up and cuddle close to me, and I'd tell her stories until she fell asleep, and we were happy, her and me."

Will's face was red, his chest heaving. "And guess bloody what? She died! She died too! Am I s'posed to run out and kill the Thames, you think that would bring her back? Then I met Ana and I thought we'd have a future together, I did everything in the damn world for her, and she stabbed me in the back and run off with Grand Duke Shitski von Shitovich or whatever his bloody name was, and it hurt until I wanted to take out me fuckin' heart to make the pain stop! But did you see me runnin' off to St. Petersburg to murder all the Russkies I could get my 'ands on? No! You – bloody – well – didn't!"

Emma, who had more or less regained her equilibrium by this point, got unsteadily to her feet, not sure whether she should intervene in the conflict and if so, where. She was repulsed, but not in the least surprised, by Hook's cavalier betrayal of Elsa, and if there was a small part of her that was hurt and disappointed by it as well, she quickly walled it away. Will seemed to be doing quite well giving the pirate a tongue-lashing – a brave thing to do, considering who this man was – and she stepped to his side in solidarity. Saw Hook's eyes flash to her, briefly uncertain. "Lass – " he began.

"No. You don't get to talk right now." Will stalked forward, until he and the captain were almost nose to nose. "Don't you ever say again that I don't understand any of this. You know I liked you some, Jones, for all you were a bastard. Maybe more n' some. And I bloody well know you've got eyes for Miss Swan over there, and you're lashing out because you'd rather live in the damned past with all your dead ghosts, because you're a bloody coward. What'd Liam think of this, huh? Huh?"

"Don't talk to me about what Liam would have done. You never knew – "

"No. No, I didn't. And to reckon from the way you're carryin' on, I'm none so sure you really knew him either. Wasn't part of the reason you quit the bloody Navy after he died because you flat-out refused to kill all the Canadian rebels?"

Emma could tell that had been intended to go for the jugular, and from the look on Hook's face, it had. Why did she still feel that tiny prickle of pity for him? Even after what he'd done and continued to do, ready to sacrifice everyone and everything as long as it made it stop hurting. . . _not that you caused the Night Market to be brought down because all you cared about was protecting yourself,_ a small, highly unwelcome voice whispered. . .

Emma swallowed hard, trying to force it away. _That was completely different,_ she argued, but it rang false even in her own thoughts. Perhaps she recognized too much of herself in him, and that was terrifying. Easier to separate it out, condemn him, as his was the more obviously egregious crime. It _had_ occurred to her that it was most certainly past Michaelmas, meaning past the deadline when she was supposed to report back to Gold with pirate in hand, and he knew about Henry too. . . a cold clutch of panic twisted her stomach. She still had her derringer, could draw it and drop Killian with a shot. But to do so here in Prague, in a city full of Gold's enemies. . . well, that was no terrible impediment, and Will would surely help her to get back to the ship; to judge from the way he was ripping the captain a new one, he wouldn't be sad either. . .

"So," Will himself was just finishing up. "You don't get some sort of bloody medal because you've lost people you loved. So did I, so did Miss Swan over there I'm sure, and Her Majesty was tellin' me that her sister's likely being held hostage by some wanker named Hans. It don't give you the right to shoot craps with the rest of our lives, Jones. And you're not gettin' out of here unless you're prepared to kill me too. Go on." He spread his arms. "Should be easy for you by now. Go for it. I don't care no more."

Hook looked very much as if he was seriously considering it, and Emma cringed, terrified that he was about to call Will's bluff. But after an eternal moment of tension hot and fierce and dangerous as a pair of rival stags challenging each other to a duel, the pirate glanced away, breaking the spell. "Damn you, Scarlet," he muttered.

"What was that? Sorry, only heard 'thank you very much for saving my idiotic, ungrateful arse from a mistake I wouldn't have lived long enough to regret.' Now bloody hell, put down the queen and let's get out of here before they send down something worse than Old Stoney and his mates."

Killian hesitated, then lowered Elsa to the floor. Her eyelashes fluttered, and she moaned; she was starting to come around. Will crouched over her as protectively as a mother bird on its nest, and offered her a hand. "All right there, Your Worship?"

She waved it off. "What – _happened?"_

"Probably exactly what you think, but you can turn him into a nice ice sculpture later, I promise. C'mon." Will got her to her feet, and Emma moved in to offer an arm as well; with a surprised look at her, Elsa took it. With the three of them thus arrayed, they fixed simultaneous evil glares on Killian, who sighed and threw up hand and hook in exasperation. Then with something uncomplimentary muttered under his breath, he led the adventurers out through the ruins of the door and up the steep stone stairs beyond. Emma devoutly hoped that there was not a magic trap here too, then considered that as the statues, animated by the magic of the _shem,_ had come this way without being whisked off into a memory (did statues _have_ memories? Could they talk, reveal what they had witnessed over the centuries?) it was likely safe enough. And indeed, they reached the top with no significant calamities, stepping out into the cathedral.

The sun was just coming up, throwing breathtakingly beautiful kaleidoscopes of color on the flagstones, the air streaming as gold as the aether had when Emma saved the _Roger_ in midair. Several deacons were preparing the morning Mass, so they had to be extremely careful about their exit, skulking from cathedra to elegantly filigreed chancel screen, diving behind tombs, pretending to be statues, and otherwise assuming a rather slapstick air as they wove the demented obstacle course down to the door. They laid low in the sacristy, faces full of musty-smelling vestments, waited until the deacons had turned back to the altar, then bolted.

It was all they could do not to sprint across the plaza and through the gate into the streets of Prague. It was coming to life as well, and Emma's mouth watered as they passed a stall packed with fragrant, flaky pastries just pulled from the oven. Glancing over his shoulder, Killian saw her expression, stopped, and bought one for her. Then, seeing both Will and Elsa looking at it like starving pigeons about to converge on a single crumb, he heaved an utterly put-upon sigh and bought some for them as well. He himself took nothing, apparently intent on whatever new course of action he had decided on, and marched his munching cohorts, like a train of ducklings behind their mother, back to the boarding house.

Their landlady, carrying a laden breakfast tray down the hall, stared at them, clearly forming The Worst opinion of their moral character upon their return with a dirty, shivering woman in nothing but a torn nightdress, and immediately took Elsa under her wing, throwing murderous looks at Will and Killian as she shepherded her away. Will looked affronted, and when she was out of earshot, muttered, "Oy. _I_ didn't do nuffin' wrong."

Emma, feeling in need of some restoration herself, followed the women, both to correct the landlady's impression that they (or some of them) had been committing unspeakable depravities on Elsa, and to wash away the grime in more ways than one. Her fingers were quite sticky; the pastry had been delicious, but if Killian thought _that_ was buying her off, he was in for a very rude surprise. So she rounded the corner into the back room by the kitchen, where the landlady had hung up sheets and was just helping Elsa into a large copper tub filled with steaming water. On seeing Emma, she went straightaway to fetch another tub, hauling heavy cauldrons to fill it as if they weighed nothing, then unlacing Emma's corset as she shucked the rest of her wet, filthy clothes and submerged herself with a groan of abject relief. _"Danke."_

The landlady nodded, then gathered up the clothes, which she scrubbed energetically on a washboard while Elsa and Emma soaked. Hanging them up above the stove, she bustled off and reappeared with new garments for Elsa: a plain, clean blue dress, much mended. _"_ _Es gehörte zu meiner Tochter,_ _"_ she said softly. _"_ Gretel. _Sie sehen aus wie ihr."_

Elsa looked startled, then nodded back. She rinsed one last time, then stepped out into the waiting towel. Emma soon followed suit, and they sat dripping as the landlady combed their hair until it dried and did it up in matching intricate French plaits. All the while, she was muttering things that Emma did not quite understand, but the gist of it seemed to be that she would personally castrate Will and Killian with a kitchen knife if they so desired. The offer was deeply tempting, but Emma shook her head. "Er. . . _nein._ We are. . ." She looked at Elsa for help. "We are. . . _gut."_

The landlady made a sound indicative of extreme skepticism, but did not press the matter further, and helped them both get dressed, finding underthings, stockings, shoes, and a cloak for Elsa as well. When everything was finished, she led them out to the front room, where the men were slumped on the armchairs and trying desperately to avoid meeting each other's eye. At the sound of a throat being cleared like a cannon going off, however, they sprang upright as if shocks had been applied in twin to their behinds. "Ah, Frau Zimmer," Killian said, with a charming smile. _"Vielen Dank. Sie sehen sehr sch_ _ön."_

The landlady – Frau Zimmer, evidently – eyed him with deep disdain. _"Nicht für Sie, Schwein,"_ she remarked, apparently unworried about insulting Killian now that she had possession of a large quantity of his gold. _"Kümmern sich um diese Mädchen, oder ich werde dich töten."_

Killian raised an eyebrow and Elsa choked, leaving Will and Emma to look at each other in mutual incomprehension. Then the pirate rose to his feet, said, _"Aber ja, meine Dame,"_ and reached into his purse, handing her a few extra coins for good measure; she harrumphed, but bit them, accepted their veracity, and turned to go, as Elsa and Emma called their thanks after her. Then as the men gathered up their things – clearly they had retrieved them from the room while the women bathed – they stepped out into the streets, weaving back toward the quay where they had first arrived.

As they walked, Killian kept glancing from side to side. Clearly he wanted nothing more than to get out of Prague as soon as possible, and must feel like a marked man walking around with the _shem_ in his pocket. He kept twisting the ring on his thumb, as he had evidently already summoned the _Roger,_ but it was another two hours before the now-familiar shape of the flying pirate vessel appeared among the spires, navigating through the sky and river traffic and coming in for a landing. Doubtless Elsa's presence had altered his original plans to travel by public airship – but where, Emma wondered? There was no way she was going to get on board again without a full explanation.

The same question, naturally, had occurred to Elsa. As the crew threw down the gangplank and Killian started toward it, she grabbed him by the sleeve. "Where exactly do you think you're taking us, pirate?"

Killian looked annoyed, but answered civilly. "As a matter of fact, Your Majesty, I was intending to fly to your capital city of Christiana and return you to your home. I am certain the _Kongeriger_ would find some concrete way to express its gratitude, aye?"

Elsa blinked, clearly taken off guard. Then she stiffly inclined her head. "Indeed, it would. Thank you, Captain. I may – I may have misjudged you."

"No, you didn't," Will Scarlet put in cynically. "Got him bang on the first time. C'mon then, you can have the captain's cabin. This git won't be needin' it."

Killian opened his mouth, shut it, and made a sarcastic bow and a flourish, offering Elsa one arm and Emma the other and escorting the ladies with grandiose courtesy to said cabin. He shut the door behind them and strode off, and the two women sat at the table, staring at their hands, until they heard the engines thrum to life and the _Roger_ back out of its mooring. Then it picked up speed on the Vltava, faster and faster, finally launching into the air with a roar as all the thrusters fired and Prague fell away beneath them. Emma was startled to realize how accustomed she had become to the rhythms of the ship, knew it quite well from when she had strung it back together in the storm, and that sitting here in the cabin was quite familiar. She glanced at Elsa, wanting to talk but not knowing how to start, or if the other woman would welcome conversation. What would they discuss, anyway – their de facto abduction by Captain Hook and his infamous crew of scurvy brigands? It wasn't as if they should actually try to be friends. So Emma sat back, said nothing, and finally, the weariness overtaking her, crawled onto the bed and let the steady hum and motion of the ship lull her to sleep.

She must have gone under very hard, because it was late afternoon when she awoke. Elsa was curled up on the window seat in a pile of the spare cushions and quilts, and Emma felt obliquely guilty, thinking she should have offered the bed to the queen first. But it was liable to be several more hours to Christiana at minimum, and by the time they got there, sleeping arrangements would be the least of their –

Wait. Emma stopped, frowning. Something small but niggling had caught at her, and it was only now that she realized it. If they were flying north to Norway, the sun should be coming in through the port windows of the cabin. Instead, it was flooding the starboard side, painting a rich wash of gold on the clean-scrubbed floor and under her feet, the deck dipped gently, as if they were losing altitude, descending through the clouds. But no – they couldn't be nearly close enough – the wrong direction and –

A horrible, sickening suspicion filled Emma from head to heel. She scrambled across the cabin and shook Elsa. "Wake up! Wake up now!"

Elsa blinked at her, sleepy and confused and clearly having no idea where she was. _"Hva? Hva er det?"_ Remembering herself, she scrubbed a hand across her face and corrected, "What? What is it?"

"We're not going to Christiana," Emma said grimly. "Get up."

Elsa remained blank an instant longer, then flared with shock. Scrambling off the window, she ran across the room, Emma hard on her heels, undid the latch, and tore outside onto the deck. The rush of warm, moist air immediately provided the last nail in the coffin, as Emma looked at the horizon and saw the glittering cerulean-blue expanse of the Mediterranean Sea. Feeling like she had been stabbed, she and Elsa stared at each other a moment longer, then turned and barreled up the steps toward the helm, where Killian Jones saw them coming an instant too late. He started into something, but neither of them were, in the least, in the mood to swallow any more of his lies.

"You son of a _bitch!"_ Elsa screamed. "We're going to Monaco after all. Aren't we. _Aren't we!"_

With their destination now clearly in sight, there was no denying it. The pirate captain paused, then nodded once.

Elsa went white to the lips. Without another word, she hauled off and slapped him.

Killian took the blow without attempting to avoid it, as if fully aware that he deserved it, and Elsa, apparently feeling that one was insufficient to express her opinion on the matter, loaded up for a second one, but this time he took his hand off the wheel and caught her wrist. "Your Majesty," he said quietly. "I do not expect you to believe this, nor do you have any reason to, but I have not come here with the intention of selling you to Jafar."

"You're damned right I don't!" The air was beginning to shimmer red around Elsa, fueled by her rage, and speleothems of ice sprouted from the deck in jagged spears and bergs. Doubtless her next move would have been to skewer Hook to the running board with them, but at that moment the imbroglio was made even better by the arrival of a panting, tousled Will Scarlet, who had also apparently been unsuspectingly catching up on his sleep in the crew's quarters. He took one look at the situation, the approaching harbor, and the overwrought Elsa, and having thus deduced all he needed to know, wound up and slugged Killian in the jaw.

"Fucking _hell!"_ the captain roared, spitting blood. Apparently being hit in the face twice in two minutes was more than even he was prepared to endure in penance for his chicanery, and he turned an expression on them so wrathful that all three of them took an involuntary step backwards. Seeing the ruckus, the crew was starting up the steps to intervene, and then it really would devolve into a free-for-all. "Why don't you let me bloody _explain?"_

"Explain what?" Will snarled, planting himself protectively between the women and Hook. "If you think any of us are takin' your word again about _anything – "_

"Shut up. Just shut up." Pale as a sheet and grim as granite, Killian took hold of the wheel again and continued to guide their descent. "If you carry on like this, the whole country will hear you – I'm not exaggerating, it's quite small – and that would just be no good, would it?"

Will breathed through his nose like a grampus, clearly itching to finish what he had started and knock the bugger into next week, but for the moment, he held off. They were flying quite low now, over the red-roofed medieval quarter of Monaco-Ville and the prince's palace on the high headland, gazing serenely out to sea. Palm trees stirred in the cool evening breeze, and steamships and airships alike lay docked at Port Hercules, where they were making with speed. In a few more minutes, Killian was steering them into berth, which they made with a splash, and looked at them with slitted blue eyes. "Stay here. And please, try not to do anything stupid."

"Oh, don't worry," Will growled. "Amount of stupid things you do, there's none left for the rest of us."

Killian started into a scathing retort, but once more bit his tongue. "Stay here," he repeated icily. "I'm going to see Jafar, by myself."

"And that makes me feel so much better. Off to sell us all for a bit of pocket lint and a pair of undershorts Gold might have owned once. If you think I'm fallin' for that, you – "

" _Shut up."_ Killian rubbed two fingers at the apparently permanent crease between his dark brows. "I took a great risk coming here, I apologize for the necessity of lying to you, and I actually am trying my bloody damndest to keep you safe. It's my bargain with Jafar. I have to face the consequences."

"I'll come with you," Emma said. "So I can make sure you don't – "

"No!" Killian snapped, with shocking vehemence. Seeing them staring, he modulated his tone. "No, lass. I'd rather not have you anywhere near him. He'll get what he's paid for, but only that, and it might not be so satisfying as he thinks. Now for the bloody love of God, go below and stay there until I get back. All of you."

Will, Emma, and Elsa exchanged deeply dubious glances. It went against every instinct in their bodies to let the captain out of their sight after the underhanded stunt he had just pulled, but none of them were eager for a pleasant conversation with Jafar. And Emma's ability to sense lies was telling her something too. This was perhaps not entirely the truth, but not all a deception either. Somehow, in his dangerous, dark, broken way, he was genuinely trying to keep them from harm.

"All right," she said abruptly, startling everyone. "Go. But if you aren't back by midnight, there's going to be hell to pay."

"Oh, I have no doubt, darling." Killian's mouth quirked wryly. They gazed at each other for a strange moment longer, both of them seeming to have difficulty breaking it, and then he turned away, pulling up the collar of his coat and strapping on his sword and several extra pistols. It was clear what kind of situation he thought he was walking into, and it made Emma's stomach lurch, unwelcomingly. It would be fine. He could more than handle himself, and anything he got, he probably deserved.

Still, though. That didn't stop her from watching, standing at the ship's rail, as his solitary black silhouette vanished into the crookback streets, into the twilight, and was gone.

* * *

Killian Jones walked briskly, but without haste or concern, as the harbor slanted away below him and he wound through the dimly gaslit lanes. Monaco was developing a certain reputation as the pleasure retreat of the moneyed aristocracy, and he had to dodge drunken dandies with untied silk cravats, fetching mademoiselles with necklines far lower than they could ever have gotten away with at home, and other idlers, louts, and a particularly persistent Italian who wanted him to invest in his very own Tuscan vineyard. Killian finally disposed of him with a few choice words about his mother (Italians and their mothers, there was _some_ sort of complex there) and carried on walking. Les Spélugues (or as Jafar had renamed it, Monte Carlo) lay on the eastern edge of the city, quite close to Port Hercules, and shortly thereafter, he entered the neighborhood.

It still bore traces of its previous rundown state, but it was clear that Jafar had been hard at work already, and was swiftly making it over, apparently by the simple expedient of throwing out all the previous tenants and burning their dilapidated dwellings to the ground. New edifices of marble and brick were rising in their place, and at the top of the hill, Killian could see the grandest of them all, a great baroque immensity sculpted of creamy stone, enclosed in scaffolding, the beginnings of a splendid plaza and two half-dug fountains laid out in a stately colonnade. The workers had all gone home, and the place was almost quiet, not the thriving hive of activity and noise it must be by day, and Killian stood surveying it for a long moment. Then he crossed himself, because that was the only thing to do when you were going to visit the devil, and started to walk.

The first stars were coming out by the time he reached the half-built palace, which towered over him. He briefly wondered what he would do if Jafar wasn't here, but then he caught sight of a small, glowing pinprick on the balcony above. It was immediately thereafter revealed to be the end of a cigar, as the tall silhouette of the sorcerer lifted it to his mouth and took a languid drag. "Welcome to Monaco, Captain."

Killian cocked his head. Yet again, Jafar had displayed not the slightest sign of surprise at his arrival, and that was troubling. Once could be coincidence, but two was a pattern, and he suddenly remembered what Jafar had told him back in Paris, that he'd had him watched, and in Prague, when he had known about Emma and Will. _How much_ does _he know, exactly?_ "I have what you asked for."

"Indeed," Jafar said, perfectly mimicking his tone. "Well then, come up here and let me see."

Killian went around to the stairs and climbed the broad promenade. Once he had reached him, Jafar carelessly flicked the embers from his cigar and raised a hand, leading Killian into the vast, incomplete interior of the casino. It was merely rough stone and sawdust and stacked heaps of tools and matériel, but he could see that when finished, furnished, decorated, and filled with fashionably dressed and exorbitantly wealthy gamblers ready to fritter away thousands of francs on cards and dice and drink, it would be quite a spectacle indeed. He might even play a round or two; he likewise had money to burn and no particular care for where it went. "Marvelous," he said, voice echoing. "You have made remarkable progress."

"Why, thank you," Jafar answered, with elegantly faux modesty. "I have, of course, helped the process along with my own small skills, and feel confident that we shall be ready to open by Christmas. What a wonderful time to celebrate with friends and family, is it not? Oh dear me. That was terribly insensitive. I do beg your pardons."

"Of course," Killian said through numb lips. "Well, as I said. I have both the savant and the _shem_. They're on my ship, waiting to be handed over. I told them to stay there for their own protection, but it's so they don't get any foolish ideas about running off and requiring time to be wasted tracking them down."

"Clever. The principle of honey and vinegar and the proportion of flies caught with each, I see. Which savant?"

"Queen Elsa of Norway and Sweden, who else?"

"Ah. How industrious of you to bring her all the way here to me, if somewhat baffling, seeing as she was already safely in my custody." Jafar shrugged. "But doubtless you will have worked out that my plans really do require _two_ savants. Once I put Elsa to her purpose, she will no longer be useful as an object for my scientific study. I shall need another, whole and unspoiled. Have your travels led you across such a one yet, Captain?"

"Perhaps. But in such a splendid house of gaming such as this will soon be, winnings don't come without risk, do they?" Killian removed his hand from his pocket, revealing a small black cube in his palm. "A wager on it. If it turns up skull, I will tell you everything you wish to know. If it turns up crossbones. . . I won't."

Jafar blinked, then smiled. "Brash, Captain. Quite brash. A character trait I do admire, believe me, but alas, I do not play with another man's loaded dice. I find your notion of a game of chance most delightful, however. This way."

With that, he strode across the floor to one of the alcoves, slightly more complete than the rest. Something was hanging on the wall that Killian recognized as a roulette wheel, the simplest of all betting sports – lay money on whether the ball would drop in red or black, or in a certain number or range. Play a run for as long as you dared, win as long as you were right, but if you guessed wrong, you lost everything. _So I had best guess right as well._

"Here," Jafar proclaimed proudly, as if he was about to unveil a long-lost da Vinci. "You are familiar with the rules, I surmise?"

"Aye. Though I'm unsure if yours are the same as the standard ones."

Once more, Jafar laughed, but there was unmistakably a dangerous glint in his eye. "Oh, almost the same, with the odd tweak to make it more intriguing. But before we begin, I must ask if you are fond of stories, Captain."

"Depends on what sort."

"Only a short one, and rather a sad one, I am afraid."

"A cautionary tale?"

"If you wish to call it that." Jafar paused, then began, "Once upon a time in a faraway land, there lived a small boy in a great and marvelous palace. For it belonged to the sultan, you see, and by a happy accident of fate, this small boy was the sultan's son, a prince of the realm. But through a second accident of fate as grievous as the first was happy, he was not born to the sultan's favorite wife, his crowned queen and mother of his heirs, but to a lowly concubine of the harem. Hence, illegitimate. Not that he understood what that word meant, or why it was so often thrown in his face, but children are so innocent of this world and its wicked ways. At any rate, the boy was unusually clever and gifted, and as he grew, the jealous sultana took notice of him, fearing that he would challenge her trueborn sons, his half-brothers, for the succession. Not an unfounded fear – fratricide being rather an imperial pastime," Jafar added apologetically, like a tour guide excusing away some barbarous local custom of the natives. "Therefore, something must be done."

"One night when the boy was seven, he was summoned to the sultan's private quarters. He was most excited, for he had always admired his splendid lordly father from afar, and thought that now he would finally make better acquaintance with him. And indeed, the sultan welcomed him in and was most gracious and kind, saying he had heard all about the boy from his tutors and was proud to call him son. Then he led him to a basin of water set by the window, and said that a great soothsayer had bid him to look into it, to scry what majestic destiny awaited the boy. Nothing else would do, of course, but that the boy look too. So in all eagerness, he did so. Climbed up and gazed down into the water. Only for the sultan to grab the back of his neck, force him into it, and make an utmost effort to drown him like a dog."

Killian looked sharply at the sorcerer, but Jafar's face had not changed in the least. Calmly he continued, "It was only luck that prevented the sultan from accomplishing this terrible deed. Some fortuitous distraction, and the boy was judged to be well enough dead and thrown out into the streets. But he was _not_ dead at all, and he survived, and he remembered. And after a time, he was taken notice of by those of far more use to him, and shown the error of his illusions about good and evil, about magic and power, and the very structure of the universe itself. So you see. It was only chance that he was saved, that he lived and did not die, and became what he was and is. Such a stake for a cosmic wager, _n'est-ce pas?_ And with such results. It seems only fitting that we now make the same wager, with the same stakes, once again."

"Oh?" Killian's voice was as cool as Jafar's. "My life on the turn of that roulette wheel, is it?"

"Not in the least. You remain extremely valuable to me, and hence there is no point and purpose in discarding you. No. The life I propose to wager is rather different. Miss Emma Swan's."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Miss Emma Swan's," Jafar repeated, like a schoolmaster for the benefit of a depressingly dense pupil. "Truthfully, Captain, I am surprised it had to come to this. Why so much care for the hand and servant of your enemy?"

"I – beg – your – pardon?"

"You didn't know? Well, I suppose you must not have, considering how libertine you have been sharing information and I daresay, affection with the lady. But she was hired by Robert Gold – your mortal foe, surely I don't have to remind you of that as well – for the sole purpose of hunting you down and delivering you to the Royal Society's clutches. Granted, she's making a botch of it thus far, for which the incidental charms of your person must be blamed, but I'm quite sure she'll soon get round to it. Oh, that reminds me. I have recently acquired a singular curiosity, a wardrobe made of enchanted wood, which purports to be able to transport the user to various, shall we say, _otherwheres._ I could end up somewhere as fantastic as Scheherazade's lost City of Brass, or somewhere as mundane as Yorkshire, who knows?" Jafar made a dismissive little gesture. "Though I am sure that even Yorkshire has its attractions."

"None that I can think of. Well, we know what you wish to wager. What about what I wish to?"

"Ah, Captain. I am terribly sorry, but that is the place where my rules deviate from the norm. The game is already set, the pieces in motion, and all we need is your call. We shall keep this simple." Jafar made another gesture, and the roulette wheel began to spin. "Red or black?"

Killian looked at him with a bored expression. "Black."

"The call is in for black," Jafar announced, for the benefit of their imaginary audience. "Shall it. . . shall it be. . . how very tense, how very. . . and oh my! Surely everyone breathes a sigh of great relief as the pirate takes the first round – we shall, of course, play six, in honor of the popular version of this game employing a pistol loaded with five blank cartridges and one live one. Black it is. Have you a second call, Captain?"

"Black."

"Ah. Riding the hot hand, I see." Jafar set the wheel spinning again. "We wait and wait, clutching at our pearls. . . and indeed, black it is again. Two rounds in the books. Can Miss Swan survive another four? Such pathos and intrigue! The nation has not hung so breathlessly in the balance since it awaited news from Waterloo. And for the third call, we turn once more to our only player. Monsieur Jones. . .?"

"Black."

"For a third time?" Jafar arched an eyebrow. "So be it. The call for black is in, and it spins – and spins – _oh,_ near miss with red there, very near miss – shall this alarm Monsieur Jones into altering his wager? It does not, and. . . black. Halfway through. The stakes mount. For your fourth call, good sir?"

"Black."

"A most perilous strategy here." Jafar rubbed his chin. "But one sticks with the horse that is winning the race, so to speak. The call is in, the wheel spins and spins, we wait tensely upon its fall. . . and for the fourth time, Monsieur Jones makes it through. Two more. Two more. And your call?"

"Black."

"For the fifth time. This is quite shocking. But of course, the punter's wishes must be respected, and hence. . . away we go, and the ball whirls like a dervish, and we hold our breath in tremulous anticipation – and by Jove, it falls black _again!_ So, the sixth and final round. Monsieur?"

Killian stared straight into the sorcerer's serpentine eyes. "Black."

"Going for broke?" But this time Jafar did not start the wheel. "Have you heard," he enquired, "of something called the gambler's fallacy? By rights, you should have called red by now, because by the fallacy's operation, you think that it is more likely to fall red because it has now fallen black five times in a row. This hinges on the idea that past events have any ability to influence future ones. But indeed, each time the ball falls, it could just as likely be either red or black, regardless of previous results. So if we applied this logic to a real-world situation, a person might think, for example, that he is more likely to succeed at revenge this time because he has failed in all previous attempts. But he is not. He has equal chance of success or failure. He has no cumulative luck built in, starts from absolute scratch each time. Depressing, isn't it? Now, monsieur. It is not too late. Red – or black?"

Killian smiled twistedly. "Black."

"I have tried my best," Jafar assured the invisible patrons. "But he is sticking with the call, and one last time, the wheel glides into motion. The ball dances wildly. Such spectacle, such stirring emotion. Is it life we are witnessing here, or death? Or – _ah."_

For then, one last time, the ball fell.


	12. Chapter 12

Despite her utter and absolute conviction that coming here had been a terrible idea, and the pirate lying to them about it had been an even worse one, Emma could not deny that the sunrise over Monaco was a spellbinding sight, bathing the steep shoulders of the city and its glittering sea in a fragile rose-gold radiance. There was plenty of magic woven into its making, come to that. With France's draconian policies on practical magic being well known, all those who could not content themselves with theoretical research into strictly controlled and approved topics had fled here to Monaco, which was no less Catholic but much more willing to turn a blind eye to their presence, so long as they spent plenty of money. It was not quite so accepted as to be practiced or studied openly, but the expatriate French magicians got their haven and the principality got their protection and generous patronage, and thus far nobody was in any rush to upset the apple-cart. Wealthy guests were also willing to pay lavishly for the magicians to craft them their own custom fantasy adventures – explore the lost depths of Atlantis, fly a Persian carpet through the night sky, ride with cowboys and red Indians in the American Wild West, and much more. Emma thought, however, that if she ever had the money to spend on such an extravagance, her own request would be much simpler. _Make me a home. Make me a place with parents who loved me and didn't leave me, with my son, somewhere we were happy and safe and together._ That was the greatest fantasy of all.

She leaned on the rail of the _Roger,_ eyes gritty, sleepless and uneasy. She had swiftly gotten tired of being cooped up in the stuffy cabin with a fuming Elsa and a muttering Will, and wandered the ship from stem to stern until the crew asked if she needed anything, in a tone that heavily implied she was getting in their bloody way and could she please get out of it, thanks. Thereafter she had confined herself to her present location near the bow, eyes flicking up every few minutes to see if Hook was in sight yet. Midnight, she'd _told_ him to be back by midnight, and he had seemed sincere in promising that he would. But as she had already learned, that was the maddening thing about him, shiftless as sand, changing loyalties as he pleased. Not that she would ever trust him, not that he had any reason to trust her. . . he'd sold them to Jafar and booked it, he must have, but then why leave his beloved ship behind, with crew and cargo and precious prisoners still aboard? It didn't make any sense, even for someone as relentlessly self-interested as him. Unless. . .

Emma's thoughts had whirled in this demented spiral all night, and she was making no more progress than the last forty go-rounds, when with a sharp stab of something too raw to be called relief, she saw the pirate captain descending the harbor stairs toward the ship. He looked pale and disheveled and unhappy, face set and cold, but not seriously injured, and she went to the gangplank to lower it for him. He climbed it, glanced at her sidelong, and seemed about to make past her without another word, but she caught his arm. "Hook. You're late and you damn well better tell me why."

His lip curled. "Must I, darling? Speaking of things to tell one another, when were _you_ planning to tell me that you work for Robert Gold?"

Emma's stomach turned over. "Who said that?" she asked, as evenly as she could.

"Jafar. And no, I do not believe he was lying. Unless you want to claim that he was? Go ahead, love. I'll wait."

Emma hesitated. Her first instinct, of course, had been to dismiss it, but something caught in her throat. They were standing very close, their eyes locked, the hurt on his face with enough of a physical presence that she could feel it as if it had punched her in the chest. "No. He wasn't lying."

Killian Jones blew out a slow, ragged breath. "Of course," he said, half to himself. "So then. Why haven't you just put me down like a bloody animal with that little pearl handgun you so enjoy fondling? You've had ample opportunity. Why?"

"Gold wants you alive."

"Oh, I don't doubt he does. Yet even that does not seem to explain your reticence." He moved closer, until their noses were touching, his words soft puffs of breath against her lips. "Or no, is the Black Swan going _soft?"_

"No," Emma said tightly. She was having trouble thinking of anything more. Her entire body wanted to be pressed into him, draw them together like falling stars, crash and collide, _burn,_ and the intensity of the desire terrified her. To judge from his own hitching breathing and the faint shudder she could feel in him where he touched her, he was fighting the same impulse with all his might. She had a sudden flash of what it might look like if the crew was to come out and find them up against the bulkhead, her skirts hiked around her thighs, his hook embedded in the wall behind her head, bodies entangled, the way she'd bite him like a vixen as he thrust. . . and then it disappeared, leaving her gasping. She had no romantic illusions, no girlish fantasies about being carried off and ravished by a tall, dark, and (very) handsome pirate. But this was raw, wet, carnal, beyond even need or lust, and she still couldn't breathe.

"You know what I think, darling?" Hook whispered, his hot mouth almost, but not quite, touching the skin of her throat. "I think you don't want to kill me or turn me in at all, no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise, and hence you are scrambling for a reason, any reason, not to. On the same accord, I'm not that eager to turn you over to Jafar either. Why are the two of us running such risks, I wonder? Wouldn't it be far simpler to do what we have been paid to, and by all rights should very much want to, and betray each other? Show you mine if you show me yours, love."

Emma gulped an inadequate amount of air; they had gotten turned around somehow so she was almost in his arms, his hook resting on the small of her back, their gazes still doing indecent things to each other. There was a thin scar on his right cheek that she very much wanted to kiss, and then maybe teach him a firm lesson, put that ridiculously small bed to better use. _Just once._ But if she did it, if she ever let him any further inside, she'd never be able to do what she still had to, and she refused to shoot herself in the foot like that. But as a challenge, with him smirking at her like that, the gauntlet thrown between them, waiting. . .

"Please," she said. "You couldn't handle it."

"Oh no. Perhaps _you're_ the one who couldn't handle it."

Emma eyed him a moment more. And then, with no further preliminaries, she grabbed the lapels of the pirate's leather jacket, jerked him in, and kissed him senseless. He uttered a small grunt in the back of his throat as his ringed hand came up to tangle in her hair, hers still wrapped around his head, as they turned and swayed and went after each other again even more passionately, his tongue teasing her lips, his mouth open, eyes closed, as she leaned in, devouring him. It could have exploded into something far more consuming, could have led them posthaste to the nearest flat or even vertical surface, but she refused to let it. With the greatest effort of her life, she pulled away from him a fraction, still sharing breath, as he stared back at her with a wrecked, stunned, disbelieving expression on his face. "That was. . ."

"Nothing," Emma gasped. Her knees were not as steady as she would have liked. "So don't think – "

At that moment, slow, sardonic applause came from the cabin door behind them, and she whirled around, badly startled. "Sorry," Will Scarlet drawled. "We interruptin' anything?"

Killian's hand had drifted up to touch his lips, almost as he wanted to keep the taste of her burned into him, but at this, he seemed to surface from his trance. "You," he said, sounding more resigned than angry. "Of course."

"Surprise." Will sauntered onto the deck, and Elsa edged out behind him. "How'd your special night with Jafar go, eh?"

Killian grimaced horribly. "We – arrived at an agreement," he said, after a very long moment. Speaking normally seemed to be a tremendous struggle, his eyes still fixed on Emma. "The details of which are none of your business. We'll be staying in Monaco until it is seen through, then at which time – "

"Bloody hell. None of our business? What, you just handed the damn thing over and now – "

"Someone. Please. Shut him up." Killian spread his arms in a gesture of deep appeal to the universe. "I don't suppose you would believe me if I told you that this involved neither handing over the _shem_ nor Queen Elsa?"

Will's eyes narrowed. "What'd you bargain, then?"

"As I said. None of your business. Now, _if_ you'll excuse me, I'm bloody exhausted and I haven't slept since Prague. Try not to attract any more calamities for a few hours at least – especially you, Scarlet." And with that, he turned and stormed across the deck to his cabin, slamming the door so hard that the timbers shook.

Will sighed. "Arsehole," he muttered, though without heat, and glanced over at Emma. "What d'you think? Kill him in his sleep?"

"I – don't know." She'd been trying to read the pirate, but her lie detector was going as haywire as her still-racing heart. She couldn't detach herself from him enough to assess him impartially, and no matter how much she dug her fingernails into her palms, she couldn't balance out again. "He did come back, but. . ."

"Well, I'm not taking any bloody chances." Beckoning both Emma and Elsa closer, Will lowered his voice, steered them into a hidden corner by the gunwale, then pulled the thick roll of blood-etched parchment from his sleeve. "Nicked this while the Captain was out. The pair of you were able to take down all the statues powered by this thing. If you joined forces again, you could likely destroy it as well."

The women exchanged a startled look, then turned back to the _shem_ in Will's hand. It was a terrible temptation, but also a terribly dangerous one. Emma wasn't sure she could survive one more expenditure of raw, burning magical energy, untrained and uncontrolled, and Elsa looked queasy at the prospect as well. "Mr. Scarlet," she began, "you can't think – "

"Bloody hell. Call me Will. And I know it's a risk, but is it any more than leavin' it here, when Jafar could pop by and pinch it anytime he liked?"

"I'll. . . I can try," Elsa said doubtfully. "I'm not sure, but. . ."

"Aye, then, give it a go," Will encouraged, putting the _shem_ gingerly on the deck and stepping back. "Quick, before anyone comes to see what we're doin'. You ready?"

Pale but composed, Elsa nodded.

"Right then. On three. One – Miss Swan, step back, don't want to skewer you by accident, the Captain would have me head – two – _THREE!"_

Elsa took a deep breath, flung out her hands, and both Will and Emma ducked and covered as jagged, icy blades began to hurl down from the warm, clear morning, slicing into the deck and the _shem_ in crashing, crystalline splinters. Emma shot a nervous look at the cabin door, expecting Killian to come bursting through in apoplectic fury to put a stop to it, but even if he had been so disposed, Elsa whirled and shot a huge icicle through the latch, effectively barring him inside. Gritting her teeth, she continued to assault the _shem_ with frozen blasts, until unexpectedly, she staggered backwards, gasping, and caught herself on the hatch cover, her face a nasty shade of grey. "I. . ." she choked. "I can't."

Will and Emma hurried over, Will to her side while Emma bent to pick up the _shem._ An ugly, uneasy feeling crawled across her skin, and she had to resist the urge to fling it away. It was tattered and torn, smoking slightly, but she didn't know if it was enough to put it out of commission. She turned to anxiously survey the harbor, but amazingly, their miniature ice storm had attracted no attention from the other ships. Then again, this was Monaco, where the well-heeled and eccentric could have anything they wanted. The temperature on the _Roger_ had dropped thirty degrees in a matter of moments, enough to see their breath in the air, and snowflakes were drifting from the rigging; doubtless their neighbors thought they were creating their own personal winter wonderland. At least that was one less concern, as she turned back to the other two. "What happened? Was it – the thing?"

"I don't know." Elsa wiped her mouth. "But I thought of something. When Jafar's men captured me, they drugged me with something. I was supposed to be unconscious, but I wasn't entirely, and I heard them talking about how it was intended to temporarily deaden my magic, so they could take me down into the vault without setting off the traps. Also making it so that I couldn't fight back, I presume. But it wore off while I was down there, I can do magic again, but every time I do, I feel – " She ran a shaking hand through her hair. "I thought it was just a side effect of being imprisoned, but now I'm not so sure."

"So you think," Emma said levelly, "it might be poisoning you?"

Elsa did not answer, but her silence made it clear that this was exactly what she thought, and Will swore. "Damn it, if I'd known, I wouldnta – "

"There was no way for you to know," Elsa said. "Not even me, until now."

"But. . . wait." Will's frown deepened. "Too many things aren't addin' up. Jafar's minions took you into the vault, but the whole time, the _shem_ wasn't even in there anyway – it was in the chimera's mouth. And Jafar couldn't get it himself, I s'pose that much _was_ true or we'd be flattened already, but he had to know where it actually was. So he lied to the Captain and sent him down there anyway, with me and you, Emma, and you an' the captain got nabbed, but you came back. You didn't stay there in dreamland, you undid the spell and hence the magical trap, and we also took the _shem_ and disabled the statues guardin' the place. So. . ."

Elsa and Emma stared at him, as Emma was the first to grasp the implications. "So we destroyed all the magical defenses that were preventing Jafar from going down there and sacrificing Elsa and raising the golem – which he would do after we had given him the _shem_. And all the other things hidden in the vaults. . . he can get them now. All of them."

"Aye," Will said grimly. "And now we're just sittin' here in the harbor with exactly the two things he needs, and Elsa's poisoned so she can't do magic, and you can't do it because you have no idea how and it might kill you. How are we supposed to fight him off if he comes? Rocks and sticks?"

"I'll do it," Elsa said bravely. "I'm not falling into his hands again. If he thinks he can stop me from being who I am. . ."

"No, love. You don't have to kill yourself just because the Captain is a walking arse-trumpet of failure. Speakin' of which. . . he's asleep, and locked in his cabin even if he isn't. We could commandeer the ship right now, fly away as far and fast as we can go. . . All in favor?" Will raised his hand, glanced around, then muttered, "Don't everyone volunteer at once."

"It's too risky," Emma said. "We don't know what sort of traps there would be, if we could find a safe port, or – "

"We're talkin' about the most bloody terrifying bloke in the universe havin' free access to everything he needs to put us off our tea for good, and you think stealing a ship from a pirate who's still likely going to sell us out whenever he gets the chance is _too risky?"_ Will stared at her incredulously. "Is there something I'm missin' here?"

"I have an idea," Elsa broke in. "If I can get ashore, there must be a telegraph office somewhere. Give me five minutes, and I can wire home to Christiana, telling them where I am, that it's an emergency, and they need to send the _Kongeriger_ forces immediately. By express airship, they could be here within a day."

Will scratched his chin. "S'pose that's the benefit of havin' a queen on your side," he admitted. "But if it looked as if Norway was invadin' Monaco unprovoked, the French wouldn't be too chuffed, and that would get the British involved, and then we'd all go bang-whoopee straight off to – "

Elsa gave him a dirty look. "Not everyone is so lacking in tact as you, Mr. Scarlet. It would be a _clandestine_ operation."

Will was wounded. _"_ Oy. I have _some_ tact. I know never to say yes when a woman asks does this dress make her look fat, and I always say scuse me when I f – "

"Never mind," Elsa said, exasperated. "The point is that I can get them in here to rescue us, or at least provide covering fire, and the emergency code is disguised as a routine transmission, Hans won't recognize it. We just need to get me onshore, and fast."

It was reluctantly decided that this was their best plan (although Will was still in favor of pirating the pirate ship) and they hurried about it, knowing they had only limited time without Killian's interference. Will disappeared down the hold and returned with an armload of ladies' clothing (though he indignantly denied dressing up in them during his off hours) and Elsa quickly changed and made herself presentable. Here, however, was encountered a difficulty. A respectable woman would not be gallivanting around in public without an escort, and it was too dangerous to send Elsa alone anyway, just in case. Will looked at Emma, at himself, then back at Emma, and announced, "Well, if the Captain does wake up, one of us will have to distract him, and it bloody well isn't going to be me. So, love, of the two of us, looks like you're the one for the job."

Both women opened their mouths in outrage, then slowly shut them with martyred expressions. Will went down into the hold again and came strutting back in silk cravat, smoking jacket, and bowler hat. "Well? How do I look?"

Elsa eyed him dubiously from head to toe, then sighed deeply. "Please keep your mouth shut the entire time. It's the only possible way you can pass as a gentleman."

"Fine," Will grumbled, stepping forward and offering her his arm, which she took with two fingers, then glancing back at Emma. "Should be there and back, assumin' nothing goes sideways, in an hour or so. Just make sure the Captain, if he's disposed to cause trouble, stays busy until then."

Emma raised an eyebrow. "How?"

"Well, as to that – " Will ducked as Elsa snapped her parasol open directly over his head – "I saw the two of you snoggin' each other's faces off. I'm sure you'll think of something."

And with that, while she was still groping for an answer, he departed.

* * *

The broad promenade along the waterfront was lined with tall palm trees, elegant lampposts, and all manner of vendors hawking the same sort of twopenny rubbish found in any other venue catering to bored holiday-makers with money to burn. It was a lovely sight to be sure, but Elsa's nerves were already frayed, not least from the young peacocks racing their cabriolets and nearly killing innocent bystanders, and were certainly not helped by Will's habit of turning to her and loudly exclaiming, "It's a bloomin' marvelous day for a stroll, isn't it, love?" whenever anyone glanced in their direction. Clearly, he was taking the order for them to pose as an ordinary couple far too literally.

After the fourth or fifth repetition of this exercise, Elsa lost patience and whacked him with her parasol. "Stop it!" she hissed. "We're supposed to blend in! You are as inconspicuous as a heart attack!"

"What? I'm just tryin' to – "

"I _told_ you to keep your mouth shut. Just walk, look casual, and. . . don't say anything."

"Like this?" Will put on a giant, nauseatingly false smile and waved amiably at a passing governess with her young charges. She looked deeply alarmed and scuttled away, the children chugging confusedly in her wake.

"No, _not_ like that," Elsa moaned, hauling on his arm. "You are _terrible_ at this."

Will looked miffed, but obeyed. Yet they hadn't gotten more than a dozen feet when they were waylaid by two fetching blonde damsels in flowered hats and lacy dresses, who had heard his accent and breathlessly wanted to know if he was _English._ Upon finding that he was, they made him say "potato" five times straight, which he did most happily as they swooned and fluttered their fans. They were from America, their father being some sort of railroad magnate in Chicago, and Will looked intrigued and asked was there a lot of money in railroads, did they think? If their answer had been yes, doubtless he would have dropped to a knee and proposed marriage on the spot, but sadly, they never found out. Elsa grabbed his arm, said pointedly, "We're very late for morning tea, aren't we, _darling?"_ and frog-marched him off, the damsels still sighing rapturously behind them.

"What?" Will protested. "I was just bein' sociable! Or was it you were jealous of our tuber-lovin' friends?"

Elsa snorted. "Even if I was disposed to be jealous on your behalf," she said with great dignity, "which I assure you I am not, it certainly wouldn't be over twits like those. Now, with the way you're holding us up, it will be a miracle if we find this bloody place before dark."

"Oh, bloody, is it?" Will glanced at her appreciatively. "I'm havin' a bad influence on you."

"You don't say," Elsa muttered, picking up speed as they climbed into the shopping district: greengrocers and butchers and vintners and fine clothiers, jewelers and milliners and glassblowers and leatherworkers, porcelain and tea and other luxury goods, clockwork makers, fortune-tellers, chemists and apothecaries and a loud little man on a soapbox extolling the virtues of the new casino soon to open at Monte Carlo. Elsa felt a shiver at that, and sped up still further, Will almost jogging to keep up, until at last she spotted a post office at the end of the lane, and ducked in. As she had hoped, there was a small telegraph machine manned by an ink-stained, overworked clerk who used too much Macassar in his hair, and drawing on years of royal poise and decorum, she donned her public smile and stepped forward. "Bonjour, monsieur. I would like to send a wire, please."

"That will be two francs, madame."

Elsa hesitated. She hadn't thought about money; she never had to. She had an exchequer and a secretary and an office to manage her finances, and had not touched a piece of actual currency in years. But just as she was trying to think what to do, Will tossed a pair of coins onto the counter. "There you go, mate. Try not to spend it all in one place, eh?"

The clerk, who clearly did not understand much English, accepted them bewilderedly, eyes flicking to Elsa as if to ask how on earth a lovely mademoiselle as herself had become attached to such an _imb_ _écile_ as that. But he dutifully rolled a card into the stenograph and pushed up his pince-nez, prepared to take dictation. "And where are you wanting to send this to, madame?"

"Norway," Elsa said, as casually as she could. "Christiana."

"Christiana?" The clerk frowned. "Oh, _non,_ madame. I am afraid that is not possible."

Elsa's heart skipped a beat. "Why?"

"Why, have you not heard? The news is most sensational, on the front page of every paper. The queen is – she has gone missing, and the acting regent forbids any incoming or outgoing wires until the crisis has ended."

"Really?" Elsa said. "I had no idea."

"Oui. _C'est très horrible_ _._ But – "

"If you sent it, it would still reach Christiana, wouldn't it?"

"Well – yes, madame, but I cannot do that! My telegraph signal would be traced, and I would suffer the most fearful – "

Elsa had heard enough. Glancing over her shoulder, she caught Will's eye, and he somehow understood exactly what she needed. He sighed, cracked his knuckles, then assumed an expression of bug-eyed shock, yelled, "OY! WHAT'S THAT BEHIND YOU?" and as the clerk spun around to look, grabbed him by the shoulder and cold-cocked him with one punch. He hoisted the man out of the booth like a sack of oats and set him among a pile of parcels out of sight of the window. "Go on, then. Hurry up."

"I cannot believe that worked," Elsa gasped, scurrying behind the desk and taking the recently vacated seat, fingers flying over the worn bronze keys. As Will kept a vigilant eye on their still-out prisoner, she entered in the coordinates for the main telegraph office in Christiana – safer to use that one, since Hans was undoubtedly monitoring the private palace one – and wrote below, _Don't forget to send presents to Mum STOP Remember it's her birthday tomorrow STOP Love from Monaco STOP_. With that, she hit the last keys and sent it clicking and chattering into the innards of the machine, and leaned back, feeling as if all her wind had been knocked out. "There. I don't know what will come of it, but it's done."

"Spiffing," Will said, as she clambered out of the cramped booth. "Right then, let's get out of – "

Elsa was fully of the intention to do so, but at that moment she heard moaning, whirled, and saw to her horror that the clerk was waking up. If he did, he would send for the gendarmerie immediately, and that would just be no good at all; she was in no doubt as to who they actually worked for. Put like that, the choice was clear. She whipped off one heeled boot and dotted him smartly on the head with it, and the noise subsided immediately.

"Bloody hell," Will said, deeply impressed, as she hopped back into it. "You're my sort of princess, you know that?"

"Queen," Elsa corrected, somewhat too sharply – in part to disguise the odd rush of pleasure she felt at his praise. He was nothing, nobody, a lowborn criminal from the London streets, whom bad luck alone had forced her to work with. But she couldn't deny that after a life thus far spent in the airless diplomatic drawing rooms of Europe, saying one thing and meaning another, wary of spies in the household, dressing up and painting and posing and waving to the crowds safely isolated outside her carriage and palace, his uncompromising, plainspoken bluntness was – surely _refreshing_ was not the word, given how irksome he was. But if nothing else, you'd know that he was never lying to you, and that was utterly unheard of in her world. That was different. That was something.

Will was looking at her expectantly, and she shook herself out of her reverie – no good wasting what extra time she had bought by daydreaming. She took his arm, they glanced around to be as sure as possible that they had not been observed, and vanished, like two starfish swept out to sea, in the tidal wave of the crowd.

* * *

Emma had been standing at the door of the captain's cabin, waiting to run interference on any potential investigation on his part, for quite some time now, but there still hadn't been a peep from within. She did her best to look innocuous every time a crewmember came by, as if she had just happened to find herself here, but when Smee trotted past for the third time and informed her that Will Scarlet and the queen had gone walkabout, and it was his duty to tell the Captain straightaway, she gasped, looked shocked, and promised that she would see to it. With that, Emma dove through the door and shut it behind her, Elsa's incarcerating icicle having mostly melted by now. Then she turned around warily, not sure what see, or what the pirate would make of her abrupt intrusion of his inner sanctum, especially after what had happened earlier. Would he think she was coming to finish the job, or –

Rather quickly, however, Emma saw the reason why he had neither heard any of their attempted destruction of the _shem,_ nor their plotting, nor even her bursting in on him. He was absolutely blackout, three sheets to the wind, skunk-faced drunk, sprawled out on the bed with an empty rum flask in hand, a few neglected golden droplets trickling out of its mouth. The smell was so overpowering that Emma felt faintly inebriated just by breathing the air, and while he wasn't entirely unconscious, he was nowhere near the waking world either. He groaned, arm flung over his face, then finally slurred, "There's more in tha' cabinet. Gimme another 'un."

Emma paused, then crossed to the bed instead, perching on the end. "I think you've had quite enough already."

His eyes were mostly rolled back in his head, but he still managed to convey an expression of deep irritation. "Bloody hell. Wha' are you, my fucking mother? Still awake – don' wanna be – for 'nother few days."

She wasn't entirely sure if he recognized her or not, or he thought she was just another of the faceless women he'd brought aboard, to tend to his needs, be paid handsomely for the service, and then dismissed again, and had to push away a bizarre spasm of jealousy. She yanked the rum bottle out of his hand; he groped at it but couldn't find it again, and with another muttered curse, sank back onto the covers. "J-just go. Don' have to – see me like this. No. . . concern of yours."

"I'll decide that," Emma said coolly. "Hook, what the hell happened with Jafar? I'm not an idiot. You didn't decide to drink yourself into oblivion by accident."

He flashed her a twisted smile. "Nothing."

"Oh, I believe that. Or wait, no. I don't." Emma dug her fingers into his shoulder, trying to make him focus on her. "You're already putting us in enough danger, just – just tell me. Maybe – " she almost bit her tongue on the words, but they burst out anyway – "maybe we can help."

The captain barked an utterly cynical laugh. "I don' bloody think so. 'Specially not you."

"Why not?" Emma snapped back. A horrible thought occurred to her. "Why – was it something about me?"

He was silent.

_"Hook?"_

His bleary blue gaze stared a thousand yards into the distance. He said after an eternal, horrible pause, "No."

A chill ran down Emma's spine. "You're lying."

"And why is it. . . that 'm not allowed to lie about anything, while you get to keep all the s. . .s. . .secrets you like, Miss _Swan?"_ He bit off her name like a slap; that answered the question of whether or not he recognized her, all right. "Sauce for the goose. . . sauce for the gander, eh? At any rate, thas' my story, and I'm sticking to it. Now. . kiss me or kill me or get me more bloody rum, I don' care at this. . . this point. You saw him in the memory. Liam. Will's right. . . wouldn't know me, be bitterly disappointed in me, hate what I've done. . . but I can't stop, if there's any chance of bringing him back. . . all of them. . ."

Another unexpected, uncomfortable burst of sympathy burned through Emma, as she thought that no matter how powerful the magicians and their craft had become, the one code they could not crack, could not command with their power, was death. That was why the Church could still have some sway claiming that theirs was the only way to eternal life, that charlatans behind curtains with all their smoke and mirrors were still merely frauds and temptations and servants of the devil. Emma did not know anyone who had ever claimed to be able to turn back time or raise the dead, but if that was what Jafar had promised Killian in return for his service. . .

She looked back down at him. Felt a strange urge to mother him, to take care of him, but she was no good at it. Once-yearly visits with Henry, sitting stiffly in the parlor and talking about school, had not taught her now, and even on the occasions they started to have actual fun, Lady Regina would promptly appear to put a stop to it. She clenched her hands tightly in her lap, fighting off the impulse, then got to her feet. "Very well," she said. "Keep your secrets. I don't care anyway, believe me."

His eyes flicked to her, with an expression of such exhausted pain that she was tempted to take the words back, but they had already been spoken, and she was not about to compromise herself by showing any further weakness in front of him. She crossed the floor, resisting the desire to look back over her shoulder, and emerged onto the deck, where the crew was waiting expectantly. "It's all right," she announced. "The captain says he's sent Scarlet and the queen on his errand, they should be back quite soon."

The crew dutifully nodded; they were not accustomed to questioning their captain's word even secondhand, and even if they might not have entirely believed it, they said nothing. They dispersed across the ship to tend to their duties, most of them enviously eyeing the shore with its palm trees and pleasure houses and women in ruffles, and Emma was quite sure that several of them had sneaked off to visit it already. Well, Hook _had_ said they were staying here at least a few more days, it wasn't as if they were in danger of being left behind, or. . .

She glanced at the shipboard clock. It had been at least two hours since Will and Elsa left, and while it was possible that they'd had trouble finding the telegraph office, or any other number of perfectly good reasons, it was still making her edgy. She reminded herself that Killian hadn't come back until dawn and was all right (at least physically, possibly), but something was chirping at her. She still had the battered _shem_ stowed in her pocket, not daring to leave it anywhere else, and wondered if that was contributing to her unease, but as another hour dragged by with no sign of the thief and the queen, she was quite sure that that was sufficient cause on its own. Snatching her own parasol and attempting to look as demure as possible, she strolled casually off the ship, along the bustling quay, and set off into Monaco.

It was the first time she had had her personal freedom, or been alone, since the jailbreak at the Tower and being taken aboard the _Roger_ in the first place, and it felt good. Emma sauntered along with assumed nonchalance, using her bounty hunter skills to read the temperament of the crowd. Nothing much, no undercurrent of fear or lynching fever. She looked for the gendarmes, and saw two of them loitering on the boardwalk without a care in the world. Nothing seemed to be amiss, no city-wide emergency, so _if_ Will and Elsa had been taken, whoever was responsible had done so quietly. This increased Emma's foreboding substantially, and she was just wondering if she should find an excuse to make her way up to the casino, when she heard wheels clicking on the pavement behind her, and turned, startled.

It was a fine black hansom with deep-purple curtained windows, pulled by a magnificent black horse, and the driver had his eyes fixed on her. "Madam," he called, in a London accent. "You will stop a moment, please?"

Emma gripped her parasol. "Beg pardon, do I know you?"

The driver shrugged, and the hansom drew level with her. Then the passenger door unlatched and swung open, and she – bereft of every glib explanation or clever excuse – simply stared.

"Hello, dearie," Robert Gold said, face splitting in a malicious, delighted smile. "Not expecting to see me, were you?"


	13. Chapter 13

"Do get in, won't you?" Gold went on, holding the hansom door open. "It must be a long way to wherever you're bound. Besides, I would so relish the chance to catch up. Busy life you've had since we've last spoken, haven't you, my dear?"

"I'm fine, thank you." Emma remained fixed to the spot. The absolute last thing she intended to do was to willingly enter a dark carriage with him, with a chloroform-soaked handkerchief or worse certain to be awaiting, where she would be spirited off never to be heard from again. She reached down to her thigh to unholster the derringer, wondering if she had the nerve to put a bullet between his eyes right here, right now, in more or less broad daylight on a busy public thoroughfare. But cutting one head, even an important one, off this hydra did nothing to dull the venom of all the others; killing Gold would not bring down the Royal Society, or restore the Night Market, or keep her safe. Yet there was no other alternative she could see, if she wasn't going to get in there, and she wasn't, no chance in –

Gold tsk-tsked reproachfully. "Now, dearie, _that_ is just uncivilized." He made a quick gesture, and Emma felt the pearl-handled pistol jerk out of her hand, flying to his; he caught it and spun it around his finger, admiring it, then glanced up to her again. "And we surely do not want that, either of us, do we? Now please, be a good girl and join me for a brief chat. I am taking pains, you see. It doesn't have to be this pleasant."

Emma hesitated, wondering what would happen if she screamed at the oblivious gendarmes. But Gold, following the flick of her eyes, said, "Oh, them. I've already taken the liberty of bewitching them. Go ahead and shout all you like, it won't make the rum bit of difference."

After a moment more, thinking that she could fight him hand to hand if it came to it, or perhaps find the snuffbox or cufflink containing his aether supply so she could knock it off and render him powerless, Emma climbed into the hansom. Gold beamed, pulled the door shut behind her, and rapped briskly on the roof, signaling the coachman to drive – which he did without a hair turned, either used to his master abducting hapless individuals off the street or well-paid enough to turn a blind eye. Emma sat ramrod-straight, hands crossed in her lap, feeling up her sleeve to be sure that her stiletto was still in its forearm sheath. Whatever he was doing, whatever he meant, she would not go down without a struggle.

"So," Gold said breezily, as if they were two old friends meeting for casual conversation. "Are you enjoying Monaco, my dear? Most diverting place, wouldn't you agree?"

Emma said nothing.

"I asked you a question." The President of the Royal Society sounded more sleekly urbane and charming than ever. "How can we have a conversation if you sit there in mumpish silence? At first I thought you had come here to spy on Jafar for me. Imagine my disappointment when that proved not to be the case. Such a threat must be swiftly dealt with. Have you nothing at all to say?"

"He is – quite in earnest about raising the golem of Prague." Emma didn't suppose that could hurt to reveal. "And seeks to gain other power as well."

Gold tutted. "I could have gathered as much for myself. But you see, the thing about Jafar. . . he _is_ most cunning and dangerous, especially for that sort of man, and hence must be put out of business as swiftly as possible. It is simply not natural to the proper order of things for him to continue to style himself a sorcerer equal to the Society. Otherwise he could inspire more of his ilk to rise up against the British Empire, and as a dutiful servant of Her Majesty, I could never permit that to happen."

"Oh?" Emma murmured, doing her utmost to convey the minimal amount of frostily cordial interest. "I did not know the Ottoman Empire was any danger in that regard."

"Not the Ottoman Empire, per se, but men of his. . . color." Gold flicked open a small bronze flask and took a gourmand sniff, then a sip. "We all know that their decadent and backward society is deeply in decline, and they are in considerable difficulties with the Russians over control of the Crimean peninsula – Russia is determined to expand in the face of their weakness, which we, as opponents of the Tsar, must duly oppose. Still more, there are rumors that trouble is brewing in India, and other valued possessions of the British Crown. And likely we shall have to fight another war against China before too long. Will you recall the first, or were you too young?"

Emma had heard a few scattered particulars. The Opium War had come about because the Chinese Emperor refused to take Western goods in trade, even though porcelain and tea and other luxuries from the isolated kingdom were all the rage in fashionable Europe. Eventually the British, frustrated and unwilling to trade the Emperor the one thing he most desired – aether, because magic in the hands of _those_ people was most unwelcome and uncontrollable – had hit upon a brilliant solution in the form of opium. With the Chinese population quickly addicted, and imperial agents attempting in vain to stop its spread, the Royal Navy had invaded, beaten them soundly, and forced them to sign the Treaty of Nanking, ensuring that the opium would continue to flow in and the fine goods would continue to flow out, particularly through the newly acquired British port of Hong Kong. With the combined difficulties of Russian encroachments in the Crimea, potential uprising in India, and continued unrest in China, Emma could see why Gold took such an interest in bringing Jafar down, in case all the British Empire's dominoes should topple at once, and Jafar was just the sort of man to light such a spark.

"Oh," she said again, neutrally. "Wouldn't that be a shame."

"Indeed, Miss Swan." Gold leaned back on the seat. "We must act urgently and decisively in wiping Jafar and all his kind from the face of the earth. As well, there was a particular young woman in China that gave us trouble the last time – Mulan, I believe her name was. She fought like some sort of oriental Jeanne d'Arc, but while she has languished in prison for years, it might be advisable to hasten her to Jeanne's same end. And in the case that you find this distasteful, I assure you that I am not acting from any unfortunate prejudice, but rather simply in the best interests of science and civilization. The continued progress of the world must be the charge of enlightened men, rather than these irrational and hysteric folk."

"I see," Emma murmured, dry as a bone. Whatever the Royal Society's vision of an enlightened world was, she was entirely confident that she wanted no part of it. She'd already seen the beginning of it with their destruction of the Night Market, something she felt a continued responsibility for, and had to clench her fists, fighting a terrible urge to shove open the carriage door and throw Gold out. "How admirable."

The magician briefly preened, but then shrugged. "And let us not forget, an important part of this safety and security for Britain rested on _you_ catching Killian Jones for me. How unfortunate that it seems to have slipped your mind."

"It has not in the least, I promise you."

"Careful, dearie. Don't make promises you don't mean. Tricky things." Gold chuckled. "And from my own humble perspective, it certainly doesn't appear so. But don't fear. There is still a way you can assist me in catching him."

That only sent a further chill down Emma's back. "Is there?"

"Oh yes." Gold patted her knee. "It will be fun."

Emma's grip tightened on the stiletto, on the verge of whipping it out and making a deadly earnest attempt to cut his throat, but he merely sighed, said, "Your boy would be _so_ disappointed in you," and gave another cursory flick of the hand. Emma felt a sudden wetness in her sleeve, and when she pulled it out to look, she saw that the blade had turned to water, leaving only the useless hilt in her hand. Eyes burning, she flung it to the floor. "What do you want with me?" she growled.

"So unnecessarily hostile." Gold cocked an eyebrow at her. "I find it wise to protect my investments. So let me ask one simple question. Do you have any sort of. . . _feelings_ for this man?"

"No."

"And you don't trust him either, then?"

"Of course not."

"Then why in the world haven't you brought him to me? And don't make excuses. I happen to know that you have been traveling in company with him for over a week now. Yet you have made no attempt to contact me."

"Matters were. . . complicated."

Gold chortled. "Of course they were. So, dearie, let us put this to the test. I am here in Monaco to pursue my professional, political, and personal interests all together, and as such, I am hosting a costume gala at my mansion this evening. You, of course, will be an honored guest. I have even taken the liberty of having a dress made for you. Have you ever heard of the Russian folktale of the swans who turn into women by moonlight, entrance a prince, and must be saved from an evil sorcerer? Well, my dear, this is your moment to live your _nom de plume._ Will the Black Swan be revealed as an impostor at midnight, or banished by the victory of the White Swan and saved by her true love? Or shall the sorcerer take her into his power forever? One does wonder."

Emma stared at him as the sickening truth dawned on her. _Bait. He's using me as bait._ That was what he had meant by still knowing another way for her to help him catch Hook. He was daring the pirate to stage an all-out break-in at the masquerade ball, to rescue her – but why on earth would he ever do that? And if he didn't, then she fell into Gold's hands, marked as a traitor and doomed for whatever fate he chose to put her to, which was singularly unlikely to be a pleasant one. "You must know he's not going to come," she said, striving for nonchalance. "He has no reason to care for me."

"Oh, but I rather think he does." Gold's eyes glittered malevolently. "Couple that with the chance, finally, to take a clear shot at me whilst I am at ease among my company, comparatively unguarded. . . I know the way his mind works, you see. He won't be able to resist. And on the vanishingly slender chance that he does. . . well, that would be quite unfortunate for you, wouldn't it? Therefore I am sure you will find a way to ensure that this is so."

Emma clenched her fists until she felt her fingernails break the skin. Once more, she reckoned up her potential prospects of strangling him, but was forced to conclude that they were very dim. She hadn't told anyone on the ship that she was going to search for Will and Elsa (and why was she counting on a gang of _pirates_ to help her?) and she had, of course, left Killian dead drunk and completely useless in the cabin. Even if for some stupefying reason he _was_ inclined to lift a finger (or hook) on her behalf, he wouldn't know a thing about this anyway. It occurred to her that she could save her own neck right now, just order the cab to turn around and lead them straight to the _Roger,_ where Gold could take the inebriated captain into custody without even much of a struggle. Easy, and simple. She could. She _should._

Yet that did not quite seem fair. The furthest thing from it, in fact. And while Emma savagely jeered herself that she'd never known scruples to stop her before, the fact remained that while she might not care much for Killian Jones personally, that did not mean she wanted Gold to win – especially when he had laid out with such chilling precision just how far his vision extended. And at that moment, she made up her mind that she was not going to meekly give him such a great prize. If he wanted Hook, and Hook wanted him, they could fight it out between themselves. She washed her hands of it. All she had to work out was how to get out of here with her own neck intact, and if worse came to worse, she _did_ have the strange power, strong enough (at least when matched with Elsa's, which had likely done most of the work) to defeat the sentinel statues of St. Vitus. While Emma was not nearly so delusional as to think she could last five minutes in a sorcerer's duel against an opponent like Gold, it might surprise him or throw him off his game long enough for her to think of something else. And if she _was_ going to die, well. . . better to do it on her terms.

"Fine," she said, giving Gold a smile, lips pulled back to show her canines. "Let's play."

"Oh, dearie." Gold took another sip from the flask, then thumbed it shut and stashed it in the pocket of his smoking jacket. "Shall we ever."

* * *

The hansom rolled up beneath the vast, shady portico of a sprawling clifftop mansion a few minutes later, and Gold stepped out first, handing Emma down with obnoxiously specious gallantry. Clearly vigilant to the possibility that she might choose this moment to try a break for it, he kept a hand on her back as he escorted her inside. "Belle!" he called. "See to the needs of our guest, won't you?"

A pause, and then Emma got a start as the same young maid who had greeted her at Kensington stepped around the corner. Then again, it shouldn't be surprising; well-to-do households generally traveled with their servants, especially someone as paranoid as Gold. She mouthed at Belle, trying to catch her eye, but the other woman did not appear to notice, gaze fixed on her employer. "And when you say needs, you mean what?"

"Just that I want her to be, pardon me, the belle of the ball tonight." Gold flashed a crocodile grin. "Surely you can manage that?"

"I suppose so," Belle conceded, taking Emma by the arm. "If you'd come with me, miss?"

Lacking any better alternative, Emma allowed herself to be led off, glancing in every direction for features of the residence she might find it useful to memorize. This was apparently Gold's vacation home, but he had not come here to enjoy the sunshine and a few leisurely drinks. He could have gotten wind of the robbery at St. Vitus, or have his own intrigues in place against Jafar (she'd be a fool to doubt it) or he could be tracking the _Jolly Roger_ somehow. If in those last frenzied moments escaping from the Tower, one of the Beefeaters had gotten themselves together enough to cast a homing spell. . . but if so, if Gold had finally acquired a bead on his fiercely hunted mortal enemy, why not pounce before now? Why run even the slightest risk of letting him escape, thieve the treasures of Prague, and then. . .

Yet as Emma stood there, looking around the ornate room to which Belle had shown her, thinking of Gold's grandiose plans for a costume ball that night, the answer came to her. He _could_ merely send some agents to jump Hook in a dark alley and drag him off to a sticky end, as they had nearly succeeded in doing to Will, but the Empire's greatest enemy required a far more dramatic downfall. To take him down before all the luminaries of Europe, amidst the pomp and spectacle and mystique of a masquerade ball, the moment of midnight when the villain was unmasked and revealed. . . Gold had staged it all with the care of any showmaster in Drury Lane, and used them all as actors, painted props, melancholy players. Only now could Emma begin to see the full depth of the trap woven to ensnare them, pulling them back and forth between Gold's maneuvers and Jafar's, until she was no longer sure which one belonged to which or what either of them had actually been planning to do in the first place. _We never stood a chance._ And now that she had so helpfully broken the defenses protecting Prague's oldest and most dangerous magic from the world. . .

Emma felt faint, and had to take a few deep gulps of air, hand pressed to her stomach, until she could see straight again. _If I just get out of here_ , _if I just run away, it will be all right._ It was a formidably daunting task, but she refused to consider the odds; if there was anything she was good at, it was running. Her obligations to Gold were clearly null and void, the contract terminated. She could find asylum in Russia, the British Empire's great rival, or perhaps America, but that was very far away. _I just have to get out first. That's all. I can do this. I know how._

Emma spent the rest of the day wearing a track into the rich carpet with her pacing; food and drink were provided, but she took none of it. Then twilight fell, lights began to appear among the dark, twisting streets, and with a knock and a curtsy, Belle showed herself into the room, carrying a large portmanteau. When opened on the bed, it proved to contain a black dress, headpiece, and mask, and as Emma examined them, she began to feel a fierce, wild thrill burning up in her. Gold wanted the Black Swan, did he? Did he expect her to prettily flap her wings and sit on her perch like a tame sparrow, waiting the axe upon her neck? No. Not now. Not ever. The Black Swan he would damned well get.

Emma watched the transformation in the mirror as Belle worked. The dress – a tight corseted bodice scooped shockingly low and gusseted with black lace, the single black pearl on the ribboned choker around her neck, exposing her slender throat and the deep curves of her bosom. The skirt was layers of rustling silk and tulle, tucked and flounced, that made a sound like feathers when she moved. The oversleeves were pinned on, fitted to the elbow and flaring out, and Emma looped the cuff thread around her finger, pulling them up and down. _Gold has made a terrible mistake. He has given me wings._

Lastly the finishing touches: her blonde curls combed into a tight, gleaming chignon, topped with the black tiara, a black diamond glittering in its setting and a sleek raven's feather crowning it. The mask, encrusted with pearls and onyx, patterned like a harlequin. The only color was that of the blood-red paint Belle applied to her lips. _The Black Swan rises._ The reflection before her now was beautiful, and terrifying, and dangerous. Could love a man or kill him, dance and dice with death, a creature of night and ravishment. Emma reached out a languid white hand, admiring the effect, then turned to Belle. She did not ask how she looked, knowing full well. "I am ready."

"I – yes, madam. Yes." Belle dropped another curtsy, still staring. Through the window, Emma could see carriages and phaetons and hansoms pulling up to the portico and decanting their well-dressed guests inside; she could hear a distant hum of talk and laughter rising through the floor. She reminded herself that she was an idiot for even thinking Hook might be coming. If he had caught wind of it, he must know it was a trap to destroy him, and hence would be as far away as he, or some sober lackey, could take the _Roger._ She neither needed nor wanted him to come, not at all. If he did. . . if he was struck down at midnight, the spell broken. . .

Emma shook her head and at Belle's signal, followed her out the door and down the hall, to the top of the grand staircase. Countless candelabras, as well as the delicate golden shimmer of aether, lit the mansion's front hall and sparkled in the jewels of the dignitaries' wives competing to outdo each other, bobbing alongside their jacketed, top-hatted husbands like limpets. As the host, Gold was in the center of the hoopla, munificently shaking hands and making introductions, but as Emma started her descent, one hand resting lightly on the balustrade, the entire place went stone-silent. In no hurry, she came step by step, conscious of all the eyes on her – head haughtily upraised, looking straight ahead, making no acknowledgement, soaring high above the crowd. She continued to hold the trancelike hush until she reached the second-to-last step, waited until they were craning forward in desperate anticipation, and then, arms upraised as the sleeves trailed behind her, the wings of a great bird folding from flight, she made her landing.

The instant she did, she was swarmed. Young men crowded in from all sides, begging for her dance card, while the older ones eyed her from afar, suspicious but fascinated. Emma disdained the lot of them, keeping her attention fixed on Gold, who was watching her just as intently. When afforded a break from the sycophantic hordes, he oiled in her direction. "Miss Swan. How lovely that you have joined us to make. . . such an impression."

"I _am_ working for you, don't you remember?" Emma gave him her sickly-sweetest smile. "And you're a man of sense, Robert. You won't let such a valuable asset slip away."

Gold's eyebrows rose at the use of his Christian name, but he smiled too, lifting her hand to his lips and impressing a brief, bone-dry kiss upon it. "Good evening, Miss Swan."

With another smile at him that would have flayed the flesh from his bones if it had physical form, Emma moved off into the crowd, eyeing up all potential exits. Once she had her parasol in hand, she could do a fair bit of damage, but she couldn't run far in these bulky skirts. There on the hors d'oeuvres table – a cheese knife which looked reasonably sharp, she could cut off most of the fabric with that, and also plant it between the eyeballs of anyone attempting to stop her. A stately waltz had started up, but she paid no attention as couples began to whirl elegantly across the floor. Almost there, almost there. Then she would do it, go for it, she –

Would never find out.

For that was when she, and everyone, heard the gunshot.

* * *

Killian Jones' head ached like buggering damnation and then some, and worse, he was perfectly well aware that it was his own bloody fault. Nonetheless, he didn't care. He'd get round to belting holy hell out of Will Scarlet later, but that too could wait. As the three of them – himself, the exasperating twat in question, and the queen of Norway, all tricked up in hastily contrived costumes and masks – climbed the steep street toward the magisterial residence atop the hill, he snarled, "I swear, if you're pulling my leg, Jafar will look kind and merciful next to what I'll do to – "

"Oh, shut it," Will hissed back. "D'you really think I'm stupid enough to mistake the sight of a huge bloody airship with Her Majesty's sigil on it – and _his?_ Gold is bloody here in bloody Monaco, _and_ he's got Miss Swan. Me and Queen Frostine hid as soon as we saw that airship cruisin' in for a landing, and when we finally dared to come out, we saw her with our own eyes, gettin' into a carriage with him. Swear it. Pennies to pounds she's already turned you in. So why exactly are we – "

"I'm not coming to rescue her. I'm coming to kill him." Every breath burned in Killian's chest. He was still more than slightly drunk, but when Will and Elsa had burst into his cabin with the news, there was no other choice. Aye. Get it done. Complete the bargain. Better that way. Better than deluding himself into thinking that he still had anything left to live for. He should never have kissed her. Should never have waited so long to start. Should have kissed her every moment he could while he still could, but it was all too late now.

They reached the top of the hill, slipping into the serried throngs. The doors of the mansion stood open, gulping them in like the mouth of an inferno, and Killian felt briefly outside his body altogether. "You," he ordered the two of them in a savage whisper. "Find Miss Swan. I'll deal with Gold."

"Oh?" Will whispered back. "And what was that about not bein' here to rescue her?"

"I said I wasn't. I didn't say a damn thing about you. Get her out of here. Take the _Roger._ Try not to do anything stupid with her. Watch out for Long John Silver, he's a sneaky bastard. Smee will know the ports of call and the secret routes, the ship will do the rest."

Will's expression soured into a troubled frown. "Captain," he began. "That – that sounds an awful lot like you're not plannin' to come back."

Killian did not answer, gazing up at the mansion overhead, blotting out the stars. For an absurd moment he looked for Virgil, coming to lead him down into the fire. Then he said, "Goodbye, Will. I'm sorry I was such a bastard. But there's no helping it now."

"Killian – mate, no, _wait – "_

Too late. Killian shoved away, losing them in the crowd, and moved swiftly around the bulk of the house, then around the back toward the garden. He scaled the ivy-twined wall and dropped down into a private terrace, glancing quickly from side to side. Seeing no one, he unclicked his false hand and slotted the gleamingly silver, lethally sharp hook in its place, then took off his mask. No use in attempting to conceal his identity now, and damn if he wanted to anyway. Let them know who he was, and let them all be afraid one last bloody time. He was beyond caring. It was astounding, the courage that being a dead man gave you.

With that, blood burning in his veins, he set off across the garden, smashed the glass of the French doors with his hook, and reached in with his hand to unlock them. Stepped inside to the cool darkness, but could hear the light and noise of the party just down the hall. He felt on the very brink of total insanity. Justice at last, for everything the Royal Society and the Empire had taken from him. Soon he'd be with Liam again for real, wouldn't ever have to leave. Be with all of them. Almost there, almost over, it was –

And then, he ran very hard into something or rather some _one –_ someone small and soft and feminine, which almost let out a startled squeal, but was stopped by him clamping his hand ferociously over her mouth. As he hauled her into the pearly pool of moonlight, he saw that it was her. Gold's little maid. Oh, and he had heard about her.

"Good evening, my lady," he whispered, lips against her ear. "Please don't scream. It would be very unfortunate."

"I'll – mm – do what I – " Belle struggled to peel off his fingers. "I won't let you."

 _"Protecting_ him?" Killian looked at her disbelievingly. "Don't be foolish, lass. I can save you too, I can get you out of here. I know what that man is, what he must do to you. You're his slave, his – "

"You don't know him." Belle stared back at him defiantly. "He's a very lonely man."

 _"Oh?"_ He whirled her around, shoving her against the wall. "And – did – he – ever – tell – you – _why?"_

"His – his son ran away, and. . . and his wife – "

 _"He killed her!"_ Killian tightened his grip, shoving his hook into her face. Let her open her big, guileless blue eyes to that, if she could. "He murdered her in cold blood in front of my eyes and cut off my hand, that's what your precious employer is! A monster! He killed her, he killed my Milah for the crime of being happy with me and not with him, _dishonoring_ him! He thought I stole her, when she came to me, begged me to take her away – tell me, love, is that theft? To fucking _hell_ with this bloody idea that a wife is a husband's chattel and slave and broodmare. Milah was a person, and he killed her. That's why I'm going to kill him now."

"No." Belle pushed in vain at his arm. "No, I won't let you."

"Oh?" Keeping her locked in place with his hook, Killian reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out a pistol, and cocked it with an ominous thunk. "Then you're a problem, aren't you?"

Belle stared at him with loathing down the barrel of the gun. "Your heart is _rotten."_

"You have no idea." Killian took a few steps back, still keeping it trained on her. "Now, you have a choice. You can step aside and get out of my way – believe me, love, I don't _want_ to do this – or you can, well. Not."

"I won't." Belle planted herself in the doorway, white-faced but resolute. "I won't."

"Oh, then." Killian bared his teeth. "I should feel worse about this, but somehow. . . I don't."

And with that, he shot her.

* * *

The grand ballroom fell as completely silent as it had at Emma's entrance, but in a much different, horrible way. Then the whispers and hisses started, and someone screamed, and Belle came running into the hall, clutching her bloody sleeve. "He – " she gasped, choking. "He's – "

Gold whirled, staring at her. He went straightaway to her side, healed the superficial wound with a wave of his hand, and shoved her behind him – just as her entrance was followed by that of a completely demented-looking Captain Hook, still grinning, smoking pistol in hand. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he drawled. "Who wants it next?"

Emma's heart somersaulted madly into her throat. The crowd cleared away as he advanced, until he and Gold were standing directly beneath the great chandelier, staring into each other's faces, fixed and unblinking, mesmerized by hatred. "You," Gold breathed. "I was _so_ hoping you would decide to attend my little soiree."

"What a pity that my invitation appears to have been lost in the post." Hook grinned, a twisted rictus. As one of the nearby gentlemen started forward in outrage, the pirate jabbed the gun at him. "I'm drunk, but not so drunk I can't drop you like a mad dog, my _lord._ Don't try it."

"Stay back," Gold ordered. "He's mine."

"Oh, I quite agree. You're the only one who _has_ to die tonight. Anyone else would just be bad form." Hook brought the gun up. "You took my Milah, my love, my happiness – and for that, I take your life."

And with that, never changing expression, he fired.

Gold's hand flashed up, a shimmer of magic encasing the bullet and directing it harmlessly away – but in the split second it had taken him to do that, Hook lunged. His arm swung, silver flashing in the candlelight – not for nothing did that metal repel werewolves and vampires and other unnatural beings, and even the best-trained magicians preferred not to have much to do with it, except as a charm against said creatures. The hook caught in the cloth of Gold's exquisitely cut suit, twisted – Emma thought she saw blood bloom up, couldn't be sure – and then the President of the Royal Society, damaged but not in the least done for, flung out both hands, hurled a bolt of magic so thunderous that it exploded wine glasses and the crystal droplets in the chandelier, and caught Hook broadside, throwing him backwards into a table that crashed down beneath him. So did he, motionless.

Emma swallowed a scream, at which she must have been the only one to do so. Guests were screeching like a flock of panicked geese, fleeing for the exits en masse, smoke rising from where Hook had landed, the air reeking with the heavy burned scent of spent aether – but from what she could see, the doors and windows were slamming shut of their own accord. It gave her a horrible flashback to being trapped in the Night Market as it burned, and she jostled against the human tide, trying to reach the knife or any kind of weapon whatsoever, when a hand caught her arm. "Oy. _Oy!"_

Terrified, Emma spun around to see – of all the _bloody_ things – Will and Elsa, both decked out in evening finery, apparently here with the intent of retrieving her. But what the – Hook couldn't have brought them, why had they – but they were grabbing her, and she was pushing back, and –

The guests, barricaded in, huddled against the walls and tables, pieces of the broken chandelier gleaming like shards of ice on the floor. Panting raggedly, blood staining the front of his shirt, Gold stalked to Hook's fallen body, clearly preparing for the coup de grace. Will let out a strangled noise of horror, and Emma clawed at his arm holding her back. Didn't even know why, just that she had to – but he restrained her harder. "Don't look," he ordered her harshly, gathering in Elsa with the other arm. "Don't look. You don't want to see this."

"Killian Bartholomew Jones," Gold announced, voice ringing in the shattered silence. "You are an enemy of the Crown, the Royal Society, the British Empire, and God Almighty, and for that and your incalculable and despicable crimes, I do sentence you here and now to die. Good folk, bear witness. This is what becomes of traitors, rebels, and _pirates."_

Will moaned and swore under his breath; Emma could feel him shaking. Elsa gasped and buried her face in his shoulder. It was done, there was nothing they could do but watch Killian die in front of their eyes, or turn away at the last moment and –

Yet as Gold's clawed fist began to burn with lethal fire, a sound like a booming deep bell echoed from the top of the grand staircase, and heads swiveled in unison. Another communal gasp hissed out. A mysterious tall figure, cloaked in an elaborate crimson costume, wearing a red skull mask, stood at the railing, raised a hand, and as Gold unloosed the fire, it – instead of incinerating the unconscious pirate as it was intended to – flew to the newcomer's fingers instead, which he caught as easily as if someone had tossed him a ball. It fizzed frantically, then went out.

Without a word, the man in red started down the stairs at a calm, measured, infinitely threatening pace, his heavy cloak swirling behind him. Everyone held their breath, awaiting some new devilry, until he reached the bottom. The skull mask was even more unsettling at close range, coal-black eyes gleaming behind it, and Emma was reminded of a short story she had once read, by some American or other – what was his name? Poe, yes, that had been it, Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, Prince Prospero had held a masquerade ball of seven colors, trying to avoid the plague of the Red Death that ran rampant outside the walls of his castle – only for a shadowy, gruesome figure to arrive, revealed to be the Red Death itself, killing the prince and all of his guests. Who – _what_ this was –

"Why so silent, _messieurs et mesdames?"_ the man asked, in a deep, cultured voice. "You seem surprised to see me. Yet surely such a social event merits my own invitation?"

"You." Gold's lip curled. "I'll deal with you shortly. I have a pirate to kill first."

"That, my old friend, would be the nature of my interruption." The eclipse of a smile flashed beneath the mask, sharp and white. "I am afraid I cannot permit you to do that."

"And whyever not?"

"Because his life belongs to me." The Red Death shrugged. "That _was_ the bargain we made. It did not have to be, but he was insistent. And it's still in effect. So I had to come by to ensure that you were not destroying my investment, as well to fetch my purchase."

"I was unaware I'd sold you anything."

"Doubtless you were. The wardrobe, upstairs? I'll take it, please."

Emma wheeled to Will, who was watching in the same sort of horrified trance. "Is that – "

"Aye," he whispered back. "Jafar."

Even if she hadn't trusted the thief's word, one look at Elsa would have confirmed it. The queen had gone rigid, and something cool swirled against Emma's face: a snowflake. Even if it was not a good idea to use her magic, even it was literally poisoning her, the heat of her rage against her captor was summoning it up nonetheless. She uttered a low, animal noise in her throat, and Will reached for her, looking alarmed. "Hey, don't – "

"The mood seems quite tense for a party," Jafar announced, glancing around at the terrified, cowering guests. "Perhaps a joke will lighten it. I heard a rather amusing one that goes like this. Two gentlemen are walking in Hyde Park, and the first says to the second, 'Did you hear about the horse that was elected to Parliament? They can pass no bills, for all he can say is Neigh.' And the second gentleman says to the first, 'It is a frank surprise to me to hear that there is a horse in Parliament, for I thought all of them were asses.' Not, of course, that I would presume to insult Her Majesty's Government, nor its fine representatives. Are we at ease yet? No?"

"Out." Gold's fist crackled with renewed fire.

Jafar sighed and waved a hand, and yet again, the fire sucked itself out of Gold's grasp, flew to his, and extinguished. Then he made a deft motion, and the air wove itself into the shape of a strange black-handled knife, which made Emma nauseous just to look at. There was something fundamentally _wrong_ with it, as if the air pulled back from it, curling and splitting at the edges. "Do you know what this is?" he asked, in a low, sibilant hiss.

Gold stared at it. "The _arthame_ that was written of in the Key of Solomon," he said at last, flatly. "Or at least, so you think it is."

"Oh no. I am quite sure. There is a bottle in your possession which I would like to have to complete my collection, so this knife achieves its full potency. If for any reason you feel disposed to cause difficulty in the transaction – " Jafar smiled pleasantly – "I shall unloose a golem upon London. You have two days to decide."

"And animate it with what?" Gold sneered. "Not even you can bring a golem to life from spit and – "

"But I shan't have to." Behind the mask, the freezing black eyes swung to fix directly on Emma. "The _shem_ is here. Indeed, in this very room. You're losing your touch, Robert."

Emma felt as if the world had turned out from beneath her feet. She put a hand to the place in her bodice where she had stored the scroll, cursing herself for ever bringing it here – but the alternative was to leave it behind on the ship, and she, not trusting Hook an inch, had been certain that he would take it and hand it over. She remained motionless, a sparrow in a serpent's eye, as Jafar smiled pleasantly at her. "Miss Swan, at last. I've heard so much about you."

Emma backed away. Jafar moved with her, mirroring her, anticipating her feints. Elsa screamed something at him in Norwegian, and his eyes flashed to her – Elsa let loose with both barrels, razor-sharp icicles the size of spears hammering toward him. But Jafar flicked two fingers as negligently as if he was swatting away a fly, the icicles dissolved into glittering dust, and a sudden gust of wind slammed into Elsa, lifting her bodily and cracking her against one of the handsome columns. She slid down it, leaving an ugly streak of blood, and didn't get up.

"Son of a _bitch!"_ Will roared, ducking as a similar blast of magic tore over his head, leaving a charred hole. "You bloody madman, what're you – "

Gold had seen more than enough. Raising both hands, teeth bared, he unloosed a floor-shaking gust of magic that crashed into Jafar's counter-blast halfway across the ballroom, the competing spells concussing the ground with shocks and groans, sparks flaring and grinding crazily. Emma could see more crumpled bodies, people trying vainly to take cover as stray bolts splattered and screamed down like deadly hail. But Jafar was using only one hand to block Gold's furious barrage of attacks, and looked as casual as if he himself was the one taking the walk in Hyde Park; it barely seemed to be any effort. With the other, he was holding the black-handled knife, cutting at what seemed like thin air, and Emma could see something dark coiling through where he slashed. She ran as hard as she could, reached the cheese table, and sawed at handfuls of her skirt in a mindless, terrible panic, leaving clumps of torn black silk and tulle. _The Black Swan falling._ An arrow through her breast, plunging, _plunging –_

The air was thick with smoke from the heat of the duel, Jafar and Gold circling like lions at the kill, the candles blowing out as all the air in the room was consumed, the echoes of spells barely fading before new ones boomed out, their interlocked figures black as night at the heart of the blazing, unnatural fire. Emma crawled on her hands and knees, too afraid to stand up for fear of being hit; her head was starting to swim. She couldn't make it. They were going to die, all of them, only a start to whatever Jafar was summoning through, whatever he wanted. None of them, none of them would –

And then something heavy fell on top of her from nowhere, and she screamed, pushing frantically at the solid thing, stifling her, _choking_ her. A dazzled, eternal moment later, she saw that it was Hook. Apparently having revived unnoticed in the middle of all the commotion, he had made it to her side and thrown himself over her just as the blast went off.

"Hook?" She shoved at him, shaking his shoulder, her voice a thin, terrified whisper. He wasn't moving, blood trickling down his face. "Hook!"

She shot a glance back into the madness of the ballroom, searching desperately for Will or Elsa. She couldn't see a thing. Nothing was moving. Now or never. She grabbed the comatose pirate by the shoulders, dragging him, and wrenched at the barred door with her blistered hands, shaking from head to foot. Fell out into the cooler air of the hallway, which felt like an agonizing, glorious slap against her burning face. _I should just leave him._ Her arms ached and strained. _There is no way out._

Something – Jafar had said – wardrobe upstairs – wanted it – he wanted it – a mad gamble, but that was the only kind left –

Huffing and gasping, blackened tears rolling down her cheeks, Emma climbed the stairs, Hook hoisted in a fireman's carry. She was a strong woman, and he wasn't the largest man, but it was taking every bit of effort she could muster, as she reached the top and let him slide off. Grabbed him by the black leather again, hauling him along the floor, staring madly into every room they passed. Thought she could hear someone behind them – masque of the red death indeed –

There. At the far end. Just visible.

Wheezing, choking up soot, Emma used the last of her strength to haul Killian Jones across the threshold and into the room, to the wardrobe, fumbling the latch open. Pulled them both in, and slammed it shut behind her.

For a moment, still nothing, nothing except the sound of the burning house, and screams. Cramped tight, smell of old wood, musty camphor. Then all of a sudden, she felt the void yawn wide behind her, a jerk like a fishhook in her stomach, reached desperately for him and clutched, the only real thing, as the gates of the world swung open and they fell into the neverwhere.


	14. Chapter 14

There was nothing anywhere but chaos, and beyond that, fire. They whirled and tumbled and tore through a screaming maelstrom of unmaking, falling stars and broken skies, as Emma tried madly to focus on something, anything, to pull them out. She could see pathways spidering out in all directions, delicate webs of black gauze tugging them down, down, down. Hook's unconscious body was a dead weight as she clawed her fingernails into his torn leather jacket, trying to haul him up to a safer perch. Perhaps she should try to reach the wardrobe door again – but that would open back into the madness of Gold's burning mansion in Monaco, the height of the sorcerers' duel, and they could not. She didn't know how to direct herself or where to go. They were trapped again, the wind of the Place Between Worlds tearing at them hungrily as far off, she saw other doors swinging open in turn. A dark, demented dreamworld, a jungle island where no one ever grew old – a castle on a high crag above a black forest and a harbor – a multi-hued carnival fantasia of talking caterpillars and vorpal swords and a queen that screamed, "Off with her head!" – a world of grey steel and industrial smokestacks, a land without magic – faster and faster they spun. But she had to do this, had to. She had unwoven the time-trap, or memory spell, or whatever had imprisoned them in the vaults of St. Vitus, and she tried to work at this, but it all fell apart and fled away beneath her fingers.

"Hey, beautiful. . ."

The voice came from near her feet, startling her terribly, as she jerked and looked down to see a crack of blue under Hook's bruised eyelids. She reached for him automatically, his hand catching hers as she pressed it to his torso, wincing as she felt the damage. "Your ribs are broken."

"Is that why it hurts when I laugh?" He grimaced again, face contorting into a horrible grin. "Where are – where _are –_ "

"I have no idea. Shut up, I'm trying to focus. We – the wardrobe in Gold's house, some kind of magic portal, I don't know what exactly – "

"Wardrobe?" he interrupted. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. "Love, I – I think I – "

"No, I said. Be quiet." Emma hissed as the burning warp and weft of the magic scorched her fingers. "You got us into enough damned trouble, I'm going to have to – bloody _hell!"_ She recoiled in pain again; it felt like she'd been stabbed, and with that, the pirate appeared to decide that he had waited through quite enough of her attempts to extricate them from their present difficulty. He reached out, pulled her against his chest with his hooked arm, closed his eyes and seemed to concentrate as hard as he could, and rolled them off the edge into the abyss.

Emma's scream of protest was torn away, as she had no choice but to cling to him as hard as she could as they dropped like a stone, limbs entangled, her face buried in his chest, not wanting to see how this was inevitably going to end. Then the intangible black ley lines whirled up around them, metamorphosed into solid mahogany walls, and with an ungodly crash and banging, they fell out of the otherwhere and spun to a teeth-rattling halt in something that smelt strongly of camphor and mint. Something hard and confined and square, something that did not give when Emma shoved at it, and in a mixture of relief, disbelief, and utter, blank bafflement, she realized that they had landed in another wardrobe. Hook was beneath her, having absorbed much of the impact, his legs jammed up against the wall and her curled atop him, still clutching each other, his breathing whistling in his chest like a stab wound. Aside from that, for the longest moment, there was nothing but ringing silence.

Emma was the first to recover. She scrambled off Hook and pushed the wardrobe door open, revealing a dim, dusty, shut-up sitting room. She stumbled across the floor and hauled at the heavy curtains veiling the windows, but they wouldn't open. _Where the hell did he take us?_ Some safe house, a thieves' den, Jafar's headquarters? Clearly the trick of traversing the wardrobe lay not in trying to undo its magic, but in merely envisioning a destination. Hook _had_ gotten them out of that horrible halfway-between, but wherever they had ended up instead was not liable to be much better. It might be giving the pirate too much credit to think that he could cook up another dastardly plot while half dead and wholly insane, but she had to be on her guard for everything around him.

Nonetheless, the only way to discern the answer appeared to be through direct questioning. She returned to the wardrobe and dragged Hook out of it onto the floor – then managed to lift him onto a claw-footed chaise and tie him to it with the silken cords from the window valances. When his eyelashes, at length, finally fluttered, she shoved down the lurch of abject relief in her stomach and ordered, "Where are we?"

His gaze flicked to hers, lips parting in a leer. "Oh, but you do look good. Commanding tone. _'Where are we?'_ Chills."

"You have a lot of sore places I can make you hurt." Emma accidentally knocked the chaise with her knee and smirked as his face contorted in agony. "And you better explain what the hell just happened. Back there."

"Do I really need to, love? I inflicted some quality damage on my foe. And while my ribs may be broken, everything else is still intact, which is more than I can say for other bad days." He pulled at his bound wrists. "Oh, you're really into this, aren't you?"

Emma stood above him, implacable. "Talk."

"Going to torture it out of me? That _would_ be fun for us both, as long as you have me tied up in bed. But look around, darling. I'm sure you know this place better than I do. Assuming we ended up where I was aiming, that is."

Emma glared at him, then turned on her heel and strode smartly to the door. It was locked, but for someone of her particular occupation, that was no trouble. She picked it with a hairpin, stepped out into the hall, and –

Oh God. She did recognize the view down the long, empty drive, the wild copses of hawthorn and yew trees, the hedges, the old Tudor beams of the house, the worn carpeted staircase that led to the lower floors, the diamonded-glass windows. _Yorkshire._ They were in Yorkshire. More precisely, they were in Applewood Hall, Lady Regina Mills' remote, magnificent estate, the one she visited every Easter to see Henry and felt like a barely welcome guest the entire time. But what the – ? She knew the pirate had been here before, as he'd used it to blackmail her into helping him rescue Will from the Tower, but – she still had the _shem,_ Jafar and Gold and every other unscrupulous magician in Europe would be after them, and Hook had brought them _here,_ laying a blazing trail to her son, to –

Furious, Emma spun around and stormed back inside the room. "You _bastard!"_ she hissed. "How _dare_ you!"

"What was that, darling?" the pirate muttered, eyes closed. "Gratitude?"

"Why did you bring us here?"

"It was the only place I could think of that I knew had a magic wardrobe. Lady Regina mentioned it upon the occasion of my last visit, and she's no friend to the Royal Society. As well, you get to see your boy. What's the fuss?"

"What's the _fuss?_ They're all after us! Henry was supposed to be safe here, and now they'll descend on it in swarms! And Jafar – did you notice the little fact that he arrived at the ball dressed as the Red Death, or were you too inconveniently unconscious? What do you think that _means?"_

"Jafar?" That wrestled Hook's pain-bleared eyes open, fixing on her with startling urgency. "Did he hurt you, love?"

"No," Emma said, disconcerted. "Not specifically. Although I'm sure he was planning to, once he found out that I had the _shem._ He was more interested in saving you from Gold, because he said your life belonged to him. Then the two of them started dueling, and. . . things went to pot."

"You got me out, evidently. What became of Scarlet and the queen?"

"I. . . don't know. Hook. Jafar said the two of you made a bargain. What was it?"

The pirate sighed painfully, turning his head away. "It's not important. Between him and me."

"Yes, well. Now you're here, which I assume means that he will be too, shortly. He's been one step ahead of everyone to date. You're putting my son in terrible danger. So I need to know."

After a long moment, Killian Jones glanced back at her. She thought he might, _might_ have been about to speak, but she never found out. That was when they heard footsteps thumping up the attic stairs and pounding along the hall, and the next instant, the unlocked door of the room flew open. "Stop! Burglars! I'm going to make you wish you were never – _Mother?"_

"Henry?" Emma stared in shock at the person of her eleven-year-old son, gripping the fireplace iron with which he had intended to manfully defend hearth and home, who in turn was staring with just as much shock back at her. When he ventured intrepidly to the attic on thinking that vagabonds had broken into the house, this was, to say the least, not what he had expected to find. "Henry, I can – " _Explain?_ No, she certainly could not.

Instead of asking her for one, however, Henry's gaze shifted past her to the chaise, and he broke into a huge smile. "Liam!" Abandoning the poker, he galumphed across the creaking floorboards and knelt solicitously at the injured pirate's side. "You brought her here to break the curse, didn't you? Just like I asked! That's – that's wonderful!"

 _Liam?_ Hearing the name gave Emma a turn, remembering the tall, handsome, steadfastly proper Royal Navy captain she had briefly met in Killian's memories in Prague. She supposed he had chosen it as a convenient alias for his last sojourn here, though if she knew Lady Regina in the least, it had not weathered close scrutiny for long. She wheeled on them, already looking thick as the proverbial thieves – which in this case, one of them very much was. "Is this about what K – what he was inventing about a magical vault filled with sleeping people? I didn't come for that! We don't have time, we can't – "

"Oh, he did tell you?" Henry looked desperately hopeful. "About the people and how you're the savior, the only one who can wake them up? Come on, if you hurry, we can do it right now. It was smart of you to wait until Mother – Lady Regina, I mean – is gone. She went to Edinburgh, she won't be back until tomorrow at least!" He was almost dancing in anticipation. "Liam said he'd find you and pass on the message, and he did, he did!"

Trapped, Emma stared wildly between the two of them. She was rattled that Hook hadn't lied to her about what Henry thought, though just why she couldn't say, and furtherly rattled that Henry himself was now plainly convinced that this was why she was here. "Look," she said at last, feeling like a treed cat. "This is a misunderstanding. We did _not_ come here on purpose, and honestly, we need to get out of here as soon as possible."

"But – " Henry looked crushed. "This might be the only chance we have! Mother's gone, she can't stop you, she – "

"What is all this about Regina stopping me from doing anything?" Emma pressed her fingers to her temples. "I thought she was just an ordinary aristocratic lady who needed money and agreed to raise you, not a – "

"No," Henry and Killian said in unison. "She's not."

"Marvelous," Emma muttered. "All right, even if there was a vault, I can't actually do real magic, I can't save anyone. We don't have time, we – " At that moment she accidentally joggled the chaise again, Killian moaned in pain, and although she'd done the exact same thing on purpose earlier, she felt horrifically guilty. "We – just – need – "

"Is he hurt?" Henry interrupted, pointing at Killian. "He looks hurt."

"He's – he's – " Emma fumbled for an answer that would require the minimum amount of bald-faced lying. "He – well, he – "

"I've certainly been better, lad," Killian said wryly. "But don't trouble yourself."

"No, you're wounded. We need to find you a doctor." Henry screwed up his face and thought hard for a moment, then brightened. "I know! There's a man in the village, he came to London for the Great Exhibition and now he's touring England. He sells all kinds of potions and medicines and cure-alls, I'm sure he can help you. I'll go get him." And with that, and nary a by-your-leave, Henry raced out.

"Energetic lad, isn't he?" Killian remarked conversationally, though the strain in his voice showed just how much his ribs were hurting him. "Must take after you. Who was his father?"

Emma stiffened. "None of your business." She wanted to leave it at that, but something made her add, "Why do you ask?"

The pirate attempted a nonchalant shrug. "Reminds me of someone I knew once. That's all."

Emma stayed quiet, watching him warily. Given how long Killian had lived in the London underworld, and the fact that Neal, for all she knew, could still be part of it, it certainly wasn't out of the realm of possibility that the two of them had crossed paths or even worked together. But Neal had not been heard hide nor hair of since he had left her holding his stolen goods and done a bunk, and besides, he had always been talking about New York, how they should book passage on a steamer and start a new life in America. Likely that was what he had done to escape the law; there would be just as much work in the Manhattan magical black market or wherever else he had decided to take his talents. So Killian, if he had known him, couldn't have done so recently, but for some reason still held the memory close enough, after all these years, for Henry's face to bring it up. _Dangerous. Dangerous._

This was more than she had let herself think of Neal in nearly as long, and she turned away, arms crossed tightly over her chest. The ticking of the old clock on the sideboard sounded oppressively loud, until at last she saw the smaller, lighter phaeton, rather than Regina's heavy black coach with its massive matched Percherons, roll up the drive – whereupon Henry and an unfamiliar man in a dapper suit and top hat disembarked from it. He was carrying a large, much-patched suitcase slapped with bright stickers, and followed Henry into the house. A few moments later, she heard their footsteps creaking on the stairs.

"I'm back!" Henry blew through the door, face flushed and eyes bright with eager anxiety. "Here he is, just like I said."

"Ma'am, your servant." The newcomer doffed his top hat to Emma, speaking in a flat American accent. "Walsh, Patrick Walsh. Wizard, doctor, miracle-worker, purveyor of potions and panaceas that have made men rise from their deathbeds! Flew my balloon here to jolly old England all the way from Kansas Territory, will you imagine that? It's a wonderful world we live in. Now, if you'd like to examine a selection of my perfumes, paints and powders, perhaps a special charm or two? Not that a woman as lovely as you needs any – "

"I'm not here for your sales pitches," Emma said sharply. She pointed at Killian. "Do you have anything to help him?"

"Oh yes, yes. I'm sure we have just the ticket." Walsh unlatched his suitcase, which emitted a bang and a puff of smoke, and began to rummage industriously among the corked glass bottles inside, tenderly jacketed in green felt. "A drop of this cordial mixed into this elixir. . . one sip, sir, and you'll be right as rain." He shook the contents of one bottle into another, producing a second bang, and held up the result triumphantly: a vitreous green liquid that looked like an especially toxic version of absinthe. "For you, only a shilling sixpence."

Killian regarded the bottle with patent skepticism. "You expect me to pay you a shilling sixpence for that? Aye, it'll just knit my bones back together in a flash, is that it?"

"I sold all my Skele-Gro in Scotland – no damn idea what they do with it, drink it like whiskey? – but this is a brew of my own concoction that is, I daresay, much faster-working and with much fewer nasty side effects." Walsh smiled jovially, rubbing his hands together. "Tried, tested, and patented. Couldn't keep it in stock at the Great Exhibition. Had an elderly gentleman throw aside his cane and scandalize his wife, skipping out like a spring filly, after a sip! Every guarantee, sir, no risk, not even a – "

Ripping free of its restraining silken cords, Killian's hook shot out like a snake and twisted in Walsh's cravat, so hard that the so-called wizard choked, eyes bulging. "Do you think I'm a bloody idiot?" he snarled. "What the hell is in that fucking potion of yours aside from green dye and horse piss?"

"I – sir, gently, sir – cannot reveal – trade secrets." Walsh disentangled himself and edged out of the pirate's range. "I understand, however, if a gentleman of your nature finds himself short on hard cash at the moment. Not to worry, not to worry, another bargain can be arranged. Such as. . ." He removed a small brass instrument, set it spinning with a flick of his thumb, and proceeded to walk around the room with it like a dowser, until he stopped by the chaise again – the instrument now glowing and whirling frantically. "Sir, what do you have in your pocket?"

Killian stared at him with cold, narrow eyes. "It's your damned business why?"

"Just tell him," Henry broke in. "He wants to help."

Killian grunted as if he very much doubted it, but after another look at the boy, sighed heavily and reached into the innards of his jacket, removing a much-worn military insignia attached to a torn-off piece of leather. "This. And no, you can't have it, so don't bloody bother asking."

"Really?" Walsh eyed him shrewdly. "Even with the enchantment?"

"I _beg_ your bloody pardon?"

"The enchantment." Walsh plucked it from the pirate's unresisting hand; the effort to intimidate the wizard had left him white-faced and gulping in agony. "Quite a strong one. Real magic, high-quality. Here, let me take a look." He stashed away the brass instrument and removed a jeweler's loupe instead, which he affixed to his eye and bent over the medallion with a professional's acumen. "Dangerous bit of spellwork. Sure I can't change your mind? I'll take it off your hands – hand, sorry – for a song."

"I – beg – your – _pardon?"_ Hook looked rather dangerous himself, broken ribs notwithstanding. "Give that back!"

"The enchantment," Walsh repeated, as if the other man was terribly dim. "It's of a new vintage, can't be more than a month old. Some sort of surveillance spell, most intricately done, aimed to collect the smallest details. Are you sure someone hasn't been watching you, my friend?"

Killian opened his mouth, clearly preparing for a blazing retort, but something occurred to him – and Emma – at the same time. Before the pirate could say anything, she moved closer to Walsh, looking over his shoulder. She could sense, though she couldn't say how, the faint waves of sinister magic pulsing off it, and suddenly, a great deal of previously mystifying events made total sense. "Him," she said, wheeling on Killian. "J – your _friend._ He enchanted that the first time you met him. That's how he's known exactly what you were going to do, all along."

"What?" Killian stared at her, rolled over with a grunt of pain, and tried to grab the insignia – which, Emma saw now, was a Royal Navy crest, the word _Jones_ etched beneath. "What are you talking about?"

"This. It belonged to your brother, didn't it? Your friend must have known, or guessed, it was the one thing you'd never part with." Emma felt cold at the depths of Jafar's manipulative ingenuity. "So whatever you've said, wherever you've gone, he's known it the instant you've done it."

Walsh glanced curiously between them. "May I be of some assistance here, folks?"

"No," Killian growled, at the same moment Emma said, "Yes. Can you dismantle the spell?"

Walsh turned the medallion expertly over and over, peering through the loupe. "Could be, but not easily, and I'd have to get some of the tools back at my balloon. And of course." He rubbed thumb and forefinger together. "It would cost you."

"You'd destroy it, you unscrupulous quack!" Killian tried to grab it back, but fell heavily onto the chaise, coughing up a lung; blood splattered his mouth, and Emma, alarmed, planted her hand onto his shoulder, holding him in place before he tried anything worse. "Give it!"

"Hoo – Jones." Emma kept hold of him. "Think about this for a minute."

He eyed her, as if to say that whatever he _was_ thinking was certainly not in concordance with her, but at that moment, they were all distracted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and an imperious voice calling. "Master Henry? Master Henry! What on _earth_ are you doing up there?"

Henry tensed. "Oh ballocks," he hissed. "Sidney. I'll head him off."

With that, while Emma was wondering if she possessed a remote ounce of maternal authority to reprimand him for swearing or if it would be utterly hypocritical of her to do so, Henry darted to the door, shut it behind him, and proceeded to butter up Sidney Glass, the butler, whom in her annual visits to Applewood, Emma had marked as being so far up Regina's arse that he could see sunlight on the other side. Sure enough, Sidney could be heard informing Henry that surely he was not up to anything of which his mother would disapprove, and demanding to know why Henry had taken the phaeton out to return with a strange man to the house. Henry was full of tales about how he had just wanted to buy some toys, adopting the perfect contritely guilty tone, and decided to bring Walsh back to mend some of his broken ones. As they listened to this performance, Killian glanced sidelong at Emma and murmured, "Well, the lad's a born liar, I'll give him that."

"Gets it from his father," she answered automatically, then bit her tongue. She tensed, avoiding his gaze, as Henry was now dissuading Sidney from coming to take a look at the attic on grounds that he had made a terrible mess, and didn't want to cause extra work for the servants until he had tidied it up. With suspicions mollified, or at least astute enough to realize that he was being dismissed, Sidney retired, and after a long pause, they then heard Henry hurrying back.

"That was close," he announced, cracking the door an inch and squeezing through. "Don't worry, I'll think of something to distract him so we can sneak out. The vault's around the back, down some stairs. I know how to open it."

Walsh blinked. "Sorry. Vault?"

"Oops. Me and – and Miss Swan have an errand to do. You take care of Mr. Jones, all right?"

"Mr. Jones?" Walsh turned to look at his putative patient in surprise, who was glaring at him with open hostility. "Ah, right then. So for the elixir and the disenchantment, I'll cut you a deal. Just a pound and six for the lot."

"I'm not paying you a bloody penny. Especially not for your idea of a – "

"Wait," Emma interrupted, sensing that the situation was on the verge of getting out of control. "Henry, as I said, that isn't why we came here, and we need to leave as soon as possible. You don't know anything about this, and I'd rather it stayed that way."

"But why? I can help!"

"No, Henry. No, you can't, and I've already put you in enough danger. Regina's going to kill me, and then you, and then me again. We're just going to. . ." Emma cast madly about for a plan, and then, one lighting upon her, glanced at Walsh. "You said something about a balloon?"

"I did, madam. If it may be of any use to you, simply say the word."

"Fine. All right. We're going to deal with that – " Emma waved a hand at the military insignia – "then, after. . . are you going back to Kansas?"

The wizard scoffed. "Me? Go back there? After I have seen all the wide world has to offer? Surely not. I intend to move to California Territory and make my fortune selling to prospectors – it's said you can pick gold right off the ground, not aether but the actual stuff, and worth far more in my opinion – then build myself a large green mansion and settle down."

Emma smiled wryly. "Why green?"

"Why, because I am quite fond of the color. That of emeralds, money – and your eyes." Walsh gazed at her.

"It does sound lovely." _And normal._

"You are more than welcome to come with me. See the world, run our own traveling magic show – a lovely blonde assistant is a priceless commodity – then find a place together. California, or New York, or. . . anywhere you wanted, really."

"You're as much a bloody gasbag as that ridiculous vessel of yours, Yankee," Hook muttered, in a voice nowhere near quiet enough to go unheard. "And for the _final_ time, neither of us would take a drop of water from you if we were dying of thirst in the – "

"Actually." Emma smiled brightly. "We are. Very well, wizard. Work your magic, get us home, and we'll make you a rich man."

"Why." Walsh swept her a flourishing bow. "You never needed to ask."

* * *

An hour and sundry later, after an epically complicated operation involving the distraction of Sidney, Walsh sneaking out and returning with his balloon (which he landed on Regina's immaculately kept lawn) and an extremely unhappy Captain Hook being smuggled out the attic window, he and Emma were aboard. He had been of the vociferous opinion that they should chance the magic wardrobe again and to hell with the danger, but that was an infeasible prospect for several reasons. The first was that the only other place they knew for sure had a wardrobe on the network was, of course, Gold's mansion in Monaco – where they could not return in any circumstances. And if they returned to the Place Between Worlds without a clear idea of their destination, God only knew where, when, and if they would end up. Besides, Emma was convinced that Gold would work out how they had escaped – there couldn't be that many choices – and have it watched, waiting for them to use it again. Given all these factors, therefore, the wizard from Kansas truly was their best option.

The first order of business was to put a temporary silencer on the cursed medallion so it could not transmit their conversations – at least until Walsh worked out how to deactivate it completely. Emma had also wrapped it in several layers of black fabric and stuffed it under some oddment of furniture in the capacious gondola swinging from Walsh's balloon. It was more of a miniature airship than anything, but not so remarkable as to attract attention among the many other similar vessels, and they were sorely in need of inconspicuous transport right now. She felt a qualm of wondering what had happened to the _Roger,_ back in Monaco, then reminded herself that she didn't care. Acquiring refuge and a safe hiding place, away from Henry, was the only priority right now. After that, they could worry about trivialities.

"Right," Emma said, when she had settled Killian in the gondola's narrow berth and returned to the pilot house, where Walsh was firing up the boosters. They shot off, skimmed across the lawn, and then quickly gained altitude, veering like a daredevil along the top of the trees, Applewood Hall falling away below. She should feel relieved, but it was only exhaustion. "How much is this going to cost?"

"Don't worry," Walsh assured her. "I know you're without funds at the moment, I shan't press for payment. Though. . . if you wished. . . perhaps a kiss, for a poor lonely wizard like me?"

Emma hesitated. But it was a currency she had paid many times, after all, and there were worse things he could have asked. So she stepped toward him, waited until they were fully airborne and she would not cause a crash, then turned his face to hers and touched their lips briefly. Then she started to pull away, but he put his hand on her cheek and held her there for a few moments longer. "You need a man, my dear, and I need a companion, a wife. So what do you say? Could you see us having a future together?"

"What?" Emma was shocked. "Are you mad? We – we only just met!"

"I know, I know. But there's a connection between us. Something special. I feel it, I know you do too. Don't you believe in love at first sight? Come on. Take a leap of faith."

"I don't. . . that's very kind, but. . . I'd need. . . time to think about it, I couldn't just. . ."

"It's fine. Take all the time you need. But if you marry me, that would make you an American citizen, and it would protect you."

"Protect me? From what?"

"Charges." Walsh shrugged. "For being an accessory to the crime. When I turn the pirate in."

Emma stared at him for a split second longer, and then it hit. She felt numb, stupid, slow. "You," she said. Empty-handed, no gun, no weapon, trapped aboard his balloon at his mercy. "You – you know who – who he is?"

"Don't be silly." Walsh hit the throttle. "Of course I know who he is. The moment I saw him. His poster is up across Britain – do you think I'm stupid? Had to play it cool until I snagged him. Now I've got Captain Hook, the most wanted man in the British Empire! I've hit the jackpot, baby! Anything I want, it's mine! The big break for the kid from Kansas. You wait, lil' darlin'," he added, in an exaggerated Western drawl. "Oh God, just you wait."

* * *

Will Scarlet coughed until it felt as if his chest was being split apart, his eyes were watering, and his throat was raw and cracked and he could taste blood, but he couldn't stop. Smoke billowed and towered, and he could hear breaking glass and crunching wood as the terrified guests fought to get out of the mansion by any means at hand. He had no idea where anyone had gone or what had happened, and considered that the wisest plan was likewise to run for it, but instead he found himself plunging back into the inferno at the place where he'd seen Elsa fall, holding his sleeve over his mouth for what piddling good it did. Bodies loomed and careered crazily in the blasted murk, some running past and some motionless underfoot, until he finally caught sight of an indistinct, huddled form, trying to sit up and pressing a hand to her bleeding head. "Oy! You! Let's step on it, now!"

Elsa stared at him, still in a daze, but took his hand and let him haul her onto his back. He had a mad memory of carrying Penny in the same way as they navigated the chaos of the burning dance floor, ducked as a stray explosion ricocheted overhead, and finally by dint of sheer, unrelenting stubbornness, made it to the broken doors and piled through. Will didn't stop running until fresh cold night air slapped his face, he gasped down gulps and gulps as it simultaneously delighted and tortured his seared lungs, and could hear the bells of the Monaco fire brigade as the unwieldy brass engine with its bucket crew blasted up the street toward the mansion – intent on doing their civic duty, bless their soon-to-be-dead hearts. He, however, did not plan to join them in this endeavor, and dropped Elsa onto her feet. "Are these friends of yours going to bloody get here or not?!"

"I don't know!" Both of them screamed as a window blew out, covering their heads as glass fell like snow, and looked at each other in a sick acknowledgment of the fact that the Captain and Miss Swan were nowhere to be seen, likely trapped in there with no way out. Will felt his stomach lurch – he'd nearly had to watch the bastard die in front of his eyes once this evening and that was more than enough – but running back in there was not about to do anyone, least of all himself, any good. Instead he grabbed Elsa's hand and managed to slip them away, as the panicked survivors milled about. For a moment he hoped furiously that Jafar and Gold had just gone ahead and killed each other, but he already knew that it would never be that easy.

At long last, after an adventure through the Monaco streets at high speed, avoiding incipient calamity by the barest measure, they skidded out of the alley that funneled into Port Hercules, ran down the quay, and jumped aboard the _Roger._ "Do you even know how to fly this thing?" Elsa screamed, as Will bolted to the helm-housing and employed the time-honored method of hitting it and swearing until it lurched to life. "Or are you just – "

"No, not really, but that's not the question, is it?" Will bellowed back. He spun the wheel, trying to remember which bloody thingamajig Killian used to fire up the zeppelin, but only succeeded in making them lurch wildly like a seasick whale. "Go find Smee, he'll know at least how to – "

" _Smee?"_

"Porky beardy fellow with a red hat?" Will continued to wrestle the wheel, which by now had deduced that he was not its captain and had no apparent interest in cooperating with him as a result. "Bloody _hell,_ old girl, I'm trying to save our arses, can you just work with me here for a godforsaken – "

"Look!" Elsa screamed, pointing up into the night, as several members of the crew were emerging to investigate why the ship had suddenly been possessed. Upon seeing Will and Elsa, they gaped, were clearly about to demand where Hook was, and then were communally distracted by what Elsa had just indicated – the sight of half a dozen dirigibles blazoned with _Kongeriger_ colors, armed to the teeth, buzzing down out of the sky like an answered prayer. "They're here! We're saved!"

Will let out a rush of breath, relinquishing the wheel (which appeared equally glad to be rid of him) and watched the ships descend, fighting the thief's natural instinct to dig himself a convenient hole and disappear as the authorities closed in. Elsa looked almost overcome with relief, teary-eyed and trembling, and he supposed that his heroic part in her rescue (and he did say so himself) would likely dispose her to give him a reward or two, some nice Norwegian castle and perhaps a nice Norwegian girl to go with it. He was just trying to work out how you'd say Lord Captain Will Scarlet, Duke of This or That, when he noticed that the ships were landing close to every side, boxing the _Roger_ in. Which could certainly be for ensuring the safety of their queen, aye, and dealing with a known pirate while they were at it. . . but there was a sudden cold chill on the back of his neck, and he'd not lived to the ripe old age of twenty-five in this line of work by ignoring it. "Wait a minute, Your Worship, I don't think – "

Elsa did not hear him. Still too relieved that her daring telegram maneuver had worked, that she was (or so she thought) about to be liberated from her long nightmare, returned to control of her country, and prepared to take revenge on her tormentors, she didn't see, did not make even an attempt to protest, as the _Kongeriger_ airships threw out grappling hooks and drew board-to-board with the _Roger,_ trussing her and trapping her. It was only then, far too late, that Elsa frowned, that the crew began to realize that this wasn't what she had been expecting, and a hatch on the lead airship swung open. A young man in full military dress, medals sparkling on his chest, stepped out and grinned. "Good evening, Your Majesty. Lovely to see you here."

Elsa's mouth opened and shut. No words emerged except a strangled, _"Hans."_

" _Prince_ Hans, but I won't be fussy." He waved a hand. "It was so kind of you to tell us where you were. We were very worried."

"You – " Elsa drew herself up, fury beginning to drown her shock. "You self-serving, backstabbing, rank, vile, traitorous little – "

"Language, please. Won't you come aboard, and we can talk?"

"Over my dead body. Why should I do anything you say, you – "

"I was just waiting for you to ask." Hans gestured at a pair of his men stationed on the foredeck, and they reached down and hauled up the figure of a young woman with auburn hair in two braids, bound so tightly in ropes that she could barely move. "Your sister might want you to, for a start."

" _Anna?"_ Elsa blanched, gasped something in Norwegian, and turned a look of hell and fury upon Hans of Denmark, who in Will's estimation really was setting new records for something rotten in the state of. "You – _you – "_

"Don't worry. She won't be hurt, as long as you play your part." Hans grinned. "You see, insulted as I was that she would choose to marry that idiot reindeer ventriloquist instead of me, it occurred to me that now I have the opportunity I have been waiting for all along. It looks so much better if I gallantly rescue you from a terrible fate, bring you back to the adoration of your people, and then, to show your gratitude, you marry me, joining Denmark, Norway, _and_ Sweden in a mutual bright future. Don't you think?"

Elsa remained pale as a sheet. "Get stuffed."

"I don't think so." Hans turned to Will. "Which is where you're going to help us out, incidentally, if you want to avoid a date with the hangman at Execution Dock in London. Where's your captain?"

"Sorry," Will said. "Are you talking? All I can hear is a lot of gigantic farting noises."

Hans glared at him. "Don't play smart with me. _Where's your captain?_ He has the legal authority to perform a marriage when a ship is in international waters, and that's what he's going to be doing, for Queen Elsa and myself. Then, of course, for the safety and well-being of Europe, we'll hand him over to the British Empire, creating a new and lasting peace and strengthening the Royal Society and the aether trade."

"Still not understanding you, mate. Send up a chap who speaks Arsehole, and he can translate."

"I will not warn you again." Hans brandished an apoplectic finger. _"Where is he?"_

"Gone," Will said. "Bite me."

"I'll do a great deal worse than that if you don't take me to him. You're going to die if you don't cooperate, so don't think you can – "

"Calm down, you're goin' to rupture something. You need a hobby very badly, by the way. Knitting, perhaps, or bridge. Croquet's a stupid game in my opinion, runnin' around a garden and hittin' balls – though in this case, we'd all find it immensely beneficial if someone hit yours. But with such a small target, it'd be easy to miss."

"You will lead us to the Captain or – "

"Boo for you. Left the directions in your other pair of evil trousers, did you?"

Elsa made a choked sound, and even a few of the minions on the bridge appeared to be chewing their cheeks very hard. Seeing that his bombastic approach was backfiring, Hans changed tactics. "Very well. Think about what I can offer you. A full pardon, exemption from prosecution for any other crimes, a secure future. It all rests on you. You can bring peace to Europe. Be a hero."

Will regarded him for a long moment, then blinked. "Oy, what was that whistling sound?"

Hans frowned. "What whistling sound?"

"You didn't catch that? It was the sound of all the fucks I don't give sailin' majestically over your head and off to have a long and beautiful life without you. I'm very proud of 'em. Must be how it feels when your children get married."

Hans had heard enough. He gestured to the blue-uniformed soldiers lining the rails, who raised their muskets in unison. "Kill him."

"No!" Elsa lunged in front of Will. "You're doing no such thing!"

It was hard to say which of the men was more surprised by this. Will's jaw dropped, while Hans merely looked blank. Finally, at a curt motion from him, the soldiers stood down, but the tension remained crackling. Then, clearly struggling to regain control of the situation, the prince of Denmark turned on his heel, marched back to the bound and gagged Princess Anna, and jerked her head back, exposing her throat, as she whimpered and kicked and tried, to no avail, to get away.

"Very well, then," Hans said, breathing hard, and drew his knife. "I'll kill her."


	15. Chapter 15

"Ah," Emma said, and smiled. "I see."

"You do?" Walsh beamed ingratiatingly back at her, steering the balloon higher into the twilit sky, as the shadows of the Yorkshire moors stretched like black chessmen on a great game board far below. "Well, of course you do! It's the only sensible course of action! With the money we're gonna make from turning him in, we might never have to do another dishonest day of work in our lives! Tell me, sweetheart. New York, how does New York sound? I'll build that mansion bigger than the Vanderbilts, by George. Buy up all of Manhattan!"

"It sounds amazing." Emma snuggled up next to him. "I'm so glad you came along, Patrick. I've been trying my very best, but I just couldn't manage the pirate on my own, you know? I want this job over with, and him turned into the Royal Society where he belongs. If you fly us to London straightaway, you'll have my _everlasting_ gratitude." She leaned in, breathing warmly on his neck, so as to allow the wizard's imagination to run rampant with what exactly that might entail. "However do you manage? It looks so complicated."

"Not at all, not in the least," Walsh assured her. "So simple, a monkey could manage it. This throttle here controls the pitch and yaw, and this panel the gas in the balloon – fills, drains." He flipped the bronze switches in illustration. "This one is for the takeoff and landing. I'm still working on a few modifications of my own invention, but that's the gist of it. Once I have a proper laboratory, I'll be able to sink my teeth into it, but – "

Turning around in smug anticipation of her admiration, he instead met the business end of a heavy metal fitting, swung directly into his face with a sickening splitting-fruit sound; he staggered, eyes rolling back in his head, and dropped like a stunned ox. Emma vaulted over him, jammed the throttle into place, then reeled in the extra rope from the mooring line, dragged Walsh's unconscious body into the cargo hold, and tied him hand and foot. She pulled out her handkerchief and gagged him with it for good measure, then sprinted back to the pilot house just as the balloon was beginning to veer dangerously. She fought the controls until she got it leveled out; it felt like trying to drive an especially uncooperative rhinoceros, a particular exotic animal she had once seen at the London Menagerie. Once this was achieved, she unrolled the chart from its shiny brass case and took a quick, amateur read of their position. Aerial navigation was not her specialty, but this wasn't the first time she'd been forced to hijack a craft, and she laboriously cranked them around to point north. It was an atrocious gamble, but then again, they weren't exactly spoiled for choice just now.

The balloon lurched, swung, and abruptly shot forward as Emma opened the throttle and pumped in more gas, keeping a wary eye on the dials on the instrument panel. She didn't know how long it would take to fly to Norway from here, and while she was aware that Prince Hans of Denmark was in the middle of trying to stage a coup, she also had to hope that Elsa's emergency message had gotten through somehow, and the loyalists were mustering for battle. True, they could just as easily stroll into a swarm of waiting Royal Navy airships there as anywhere else, but it was the only option Emma could think of. She muttered a brief prayer and hit it.

The next order of business was to darken all the lights. There would be patrols off the coast of Britain, and the balloon carried no guns, no cloaking device, no weapons of any kind; she felt a pang of missing the _Roger_ and its heavy cannon and menacing long nines. She fumbled at the controls until she found the switch that snuffed the thick glass lanterns, then had another idea, wedged the throttle back into place, and climbed precariously out onto the running board, siphoning out the extra gas and feeding it into the central combustion engine that powered the balloon. Then she slid back down, fighting vertigo, and shut the storm flap again. Breathing hard, she returned to her post, spotted a pair of goggles and pulled them on, and blinked as the world turned vividly, incandescently green. She flicked through the lenses until she found the set that sharpened her vision the most, and settled in to begin her new career as a balloon pilot.

They were out over the choppy, turbulent North Sea before long, swerving and dropping as the screaming wind caught and flung them like a spoiled giant tired of its plaything. Emma's knuckles strained keeping them on course, the balloon rollicking in the tempest; she could see mountainous white-frothed waves rolling and crashing below, the spray fouling the windscreen faster than she could wipe it off. They reaped the whirlwind, about to be torn out of this existence and tossed into another one altogether, and she knew that the _Moskstraumen,_ the feared Maelstrom, lay off the coast of Norway somewhere, a roaring void that sucked down ships more eagerly than any Charybdis. At least the bad weather would confuse and throw off anyone out hunting for them, as Gold wouldn't be so foolish as to only keep the wardrobe network under close watch. She gunned the throttle again, trying to ignore the scrape and whine, chasing the elusive promise of land that shimmered on the chart.

At last, after a rogue wave nearly caught the bottom of the gondola, they finally crossed onto land and over a forbidding wall of cliffs, a massive fjord that rose straight from the water for hundreds of feet. A heavy downdraft pulled at the balloon, and Emma almost tore the throttle out trying to maintain their lift. She was aware of a sparking, straining whiteness at the edges of her vision, her magic begging to be used, to save them as she had the _Roger_ during their voyage to Prague, but she didn't dare let it out from under rein. It was too powerful, she couldn't control it, it would tear them all to pieces. She pushed it down more fiercely the more it struggled to get free; it felt like trying not to be sick, but worse. The gauge was running dangerously low. She must have burned all kinds of fuel trying not to crash into the sea, she couldn't –

"Swan. . ."

The voice was so faint that she almost didn't hear it, and then she did, and nearly had the life scared out of her. Hook, chalk-white with pain, one hand pressed to his ribs and the other bracing himself on the wall. "Swan. . . what did you. . . where the devil is our gracious host – "

"Tied up below. Long story." Emma refused to admit that he had been right not to trust Walsh, that she had been so determined not to trust Hook himself that she totally disregarded his blatant dislike of the con man, writing it off as nothing more than petty jealousy. "I'm trying to make it to Christiana, but I don't know if I can."

Hook stared at her, then laughed, with apparently genuine delight. "You stole the arsehole's balloon out from under his nose and took him prisoner? Christ, lass, you make the hell of a pirate. Christiana, you say? _Norway?_ What do you think we'll – where _are_ we? "

"Somewhere in its general vicinity. If we don't crash. You shouldn't even be up! You have broken ribs, you idiot!"

"If we crash, that will be decidedly least of my concerns," he pointed out, with a certain morbid pragmatism. "Budge up, love. Now."

Emma hesitated, then moved, and the pirate slid into the pilot's seat with a muffled groan, hook holding the throttle steady as his hand flew over the panel, making adjustments. Some of the whining and clunking cut out, they gained a precious bit of altitude, and skimmed like a feather over the wild, raw, rugged territory below. Sometimes Hook gave terse commands for Emma to hit that booster or turn that dial, and she did, the two of them doing their damndest to inform the balloon that it wanted to keep flying when it was protesting that it really did not, thanks. Emma thought she could see a faint sketch of a city coming into view on the far horizon – smoke and smog and streetlights and spires – but couldn't be sure. She got a glance at the fuel gauge again; they were running hard red, and she couldn't hear the noise of the engine anymore, but somehow, Killian was keeping them airborne. He maneuvered them as elegantly as a master artisan, catching this current and than one, ducking them lower and lower and trying to burn off as much of their speed as possible without sending them into a stall that would drop them like a rock.

As for where they were arriving with such haste, it was now most definitely recognizable as a city. Neat whitewashed Nordic churches, a cathedral bell tower, a castle, a grid of medieval streets, an old wall, and a harbor completely blockaded by a giant cliff of ice, glazing over the heavy-laden steamers that lay idle at anchor. Stars sparkled coldly, the streetlamps were starting to somersault, and it was then when Emma realized that it was not a matter of if they crashed, but where. There was a broad stone plaza ahead that Killian seemed to be aiming for, and as they hurtled in at would very likely prove to be actual breakneck speed, he bellowed, _"HOLD ON, LASS!"_ and braced.

Emma followed his lead, not a moment too soon. The next instant, the impact rocked up her from head to toe, crushing her wind out like a punch, and over and over they went, cartwheeling as the world came undone. There was a hideous scraping, hissing sound as they spun and skidded and went end-over-end, the gondola breaking to pieces, then finally fetched to a crumpled, spitting halt against something that looked like, from this inopportune angle, a large ceremonial fountain, likewise iced over in the eternal winter its queen had cast upon this place. There was nothing but the shatter of breaking glass and the smell of burning silk.

The second the balloon stopped moving, Emma started. Bruised and terrified and running on sheer adrenaline, she grabbed hold of Killian, pulled his sword out, and cut them free of the tangled swathes of cloth. Saw a spark run along the jagged remnants of the gondola, and then catch. A pillar of flame went up like the one that must have led the Israelites by night, and the balloon began to explode.

"Swan. . ." Killian staggered. "Swan. . . run. . ."

"Wait!" Emma stared back at the flames. "Wait – I – Walsh – "

"Who gives a rat's arse about him? You couldn't be bothered to get Scarlet and the queen out of Gold's, and now you'll risk yourself for – "

"No, I – " And with that, she pulled loose and sprinted back inside, running on the wall, everything at wrong angles, coughing and wheezing, until she reached the cargo hold. Whipped out her corset busk, the only sharp item she had to hand – Killian's sword would have been no use in the close quarters – and sawed madly through the ropes until Walsh fell. She seized him by the heels and pulled him back, almost incapacitated by the smoke, until she saw the way out, framed like the gate from hell, and toppled headlong onto the freezing cobbles. Dragged the comatose wizard a suitable distance from his burning vessel, then crawled on her hands and knees toward Killian. She got hold of him and pulled his head down just in time as the balloon sprayed shrapnel everywhere, clattering and hailing down around them. As secret entrances went, they had failed with literally flying colors.

Shouts were spreading from house to house. Sobbing with the effort, Emma wrapped her arms around Killian's chest and tried to get them farther away, but she couldn't, she _couldn't._ She fell back again and was just about to give into her sore desire for blessed unconsciousness, when she heard footsteps and something else, something like hoofbeats, pounding toward them. The next instant, a tall, blonde young man and a reindeer, wearing identical shocked and suspicious expressions, appeared upside down in her field of vision. One of them (Emma thought the former, but was losing her grip on reality, and could not be sure) demanded, _"HVA I HELVETE?"_

"Elsa," Emma croaked, with her last shred of strength. "ELSA!"

And with that, finally and mercifully, the lights went out.

* * *

Given the circumstances, combining the crash landing and her certainty that whoever had found her was in Gold and/or Prince Hans' immediate employ, Emma had not necessarily expected to ever wake again. Nor would she have entirely minded if she hadn't, because the first thing she was aware of was pain. That and an overpowering smell of reindeer, which she seemed to be lying on. A blanket, also smelling of reindeer, had been tucked around her, and a makeshift pillow, smelling of reindeer, intensely, propped up her head. She groped out and encountered rough hay, and her malfunctioning eyes slowly made out the shape of a high-beamed, sharp-prowed Scandinavian barn overhead. They, or at least she, appeared to have been hidden here for purposes unknown by equally unknown persons, and she tensed, preparing to sit up and fight their way out as best she could in her present state, which wasn't very.

"Calm down." A man's voice spoke above her – in English, though with a noted accent. "I'm not going to hurt you. Easy, there. Sorry about the accommodations, but the palace is crawling with Danes."

"You. . ." Breathing hard, Emma once more attempted to lever herself into a vertical position. Her rescuer, if you were going to call him that, was leaning against a stall across the way; they were in fact in a barn, and he was the blonde man she'd seen right before checking out. "Who are you?"

"Kristoff." He took off his cap and crushed it between his fur-mittened hands. "Queen Elsa's brother-in-law. Probably don't look like what you were expecting, huh?" A chuffing sound came from the stall behind him, and he glanced back in annoyance. "Hey, nobody asked you!"

"Are you. . ." For a moment, Emma was afraid that her combined tribulations had sent her permanently loopy. "Are you talking to that reindeer?"

"His name's Sven." Kristoff regarded the antlered beast with pride. "He helped get you and your friends out of the plaza after you crash-landed. We were being held prisoner too, but after His Royal Shittiness flew out of here in a hurry, we managed to get free. And when I find him, I swear I am tearing him limb from limb with my bare hands."

"Brother in law." Emma pressed her fingers to her aching head. "So you're. . . married to the queen's sister?"

"Princess Anna is my wife, yes," Kristoff said tersely. "Hans took her. You said something about Elsa, which was why I didn't just leave you to get peeled off the pavement by his hired trolls – although that's an insult to trolls, I know a lot of very nice trolls. Do you know where she is?"

"Actually, yes. She's in. . . she's in Monaco. She sent a message trying to get the armed forces to fly down and rescue her, but Hans must have intercepted it somehow. We were with her, but now we're. . . not. Obviously." Emma waved a hand. "Do you think that was where he headed?"

"Possible." Kristoff crunched his cap convulsively. "Where did you find her?"

"Elsa? In Prague. Long story." Emma grimaced, then glanced sidelong, espying Killian Jones still unconscious next to her in the straw. She wondered if Kristoff's charity would abruptly run out if she told him that she had last seen Elsa down for the count and bleeding after being knocked out by Jafar, and that the mansion had subsequently turned into hell on earth. "He. . . he's hurt, do you – "

"Here." Kristoff pulled something out of his jerkin: a brown glass bottle. "Skele-Gro. Last bottle at Oaken's. Best I can do."

"Wonderful," Emma said fervently, snatching it from him and scrambling across the hay to Killian. She slid a hand under his head, lifting him gently until his bruised eyelids fluttered, and uncapped it. "This isn't going to be pleasant, I'm sorry," she whispered. "But it'll help."

"What the bloody hell. . . is that?" Apparently compos mentis enough to put up a struggle about taking his medicine, like any good five-year-old, Killian pulled a face. "Smells like goat vomit."

"Just drink it," Emma snapped, finite supply of tender loving care exhausted in the face of his stubborn recalcitrance. She forced it into his mouth and refused to remove it until he swallowed, at which point his eyes bugged and he made noises indicative of extreme discomfort as his fractured ribs reknitted at high speed. She watched him without sympathy as he rolled to and fro on the hay, then said coldly, "Drama queen."

"Hmm," Kristoff said, observing with scientific interest. "That worked better than I expected."

"Easy for you to say, mate," Killian growled, coughing and grimacing again. When the red-hot pins and needles had apparently subsided to some degree, he spat weakly and muttered, "Is there even any damned food?"

"Carrots." Kristoff waggled a bunch helpfully, then shot an annoyed look at the reindeer and added, "No, these aren't for you, greedy guts. Or at least they're probably not."

"Carrots." Killian stared at the other man as if he had started juggling lemon pies and singing the _Marseillaise_. "You must be bloody joking. Give me rum."

"Fresh out, I'm afraid. Here, Sven, he doesn't appreciate them." Kristoff separated a carrot out and tossed it into the stall, whereupon ecstatic ungulate crunching noises emanated. "Up in the palace, maybe, but considering that the entire place is crawling with – "

"Never underestimate the lengths I'll go for a drink, mate." Killian dragged his hand unsteadily across his forehead. "And my ship. I want her back. She's presently in the same place as your sister-in-law and, unless I much miss my guess, your wife. I find it impossible to countenance that no arrangement can be reached."

Kristoff eyed him with patent skepticism. "I barely patched you together from the last calamity, and you've already got another one on the brain? I'm not sure that's a good – "

"What am I supposed to do?" the pirate snapped. "Recline here in the straw and dine on carrots? They took your wife, I seriously doubt you're going to say, 'Oh, that's a pity,' and wander off footloose and fancy free – though you could stand to wander repeatedly in the direction of a bath, if you ask me. Or is it that you don't – "

Kristoff balled a fist and hit his knee. "Of course I'm not going to let them get away with it! But they took or grounded all the airships, and no one knows how to melt Elsa's ice wall to let the steamers out. And I've been out of prison for about twelve hours. I'm still short on a heroic plan."

"Well," Emma said hesitantly, "we have an airship. Of a sort. I mean, we did."

"You mean that balloon you crashed? Without a miracle, that thing isn't flying any time soon, I can promise you that."

"That reminds me. What about – "

At that moment, however, they were interrupted by the sound of a moan from the hayloft, and Kristoff stood up. "Hold on, that'll be the third one." He disappeared up the ladder, whereupon they heard strident vituperation from Walsh, accusing them of holding him unlawfully prisoner and that in _America_ they had rules about this sort of thing and moreover they had destroyed his very valuable balloon and all the instruments of his livelihood, and he would be hiring the nearest attorney and suing several degrees of excrement out of them at his earliest convenience. Kristoff, in turn, replied only in Norwegian and in apparent total incomprehension, which incensed the wizard further. He was just repeating his demand to talk to someone who spoke English, louder and louder as if this would make Kristoff understand it (though of course he understood perfectly well) when Emma, deciding it unfair to let their rescuer take the brunt of it, climbed the ladder and appeared next to him. "Hello, Walsh."

"Ah, my dear. . ." Walsh attempted a weak version of his obsequious smile. "Surely you're going to help me sort out this. . . present difficulty?"

Emma calculated swiftly that he did not appear to remember she was the one who had put him in it, and saw no use in reminding him. "That depends," she said sweetly. "We are terribly sorry about your balloon, that was an unfortunate accident. But we might be able to repair it, if you cooperate."

"You still cannot replace all the merchandise that was lost," Walsh grumbled, though less vehemently. "How did we end up wherever we are, at the mercy of this – this sheep-shagging rustic?"

"A terrible storm," Emma lied smoothly, which had the advantage of being halfway the truth, while Kristoff looked insulted at the slur on his sexual proclivities – if he _was_ finding company in the stables, she presumed it was with reindeer, not sheep. "A fitting fell and knocked you unconscious. I had to take over and try to steer and keep us from being thrown into the sea." She allowed her lip to tremble. "I was so _frightened,_ Patrick."

"Ah," Walsh said, blinking, still belligerent but somewhat mollified by her attractive feminine distress. He raised no protest to her promising to fetch him a blanket and food, and then as soon as they were down the ladder, she jerked her head at Kristoff, who followed her obligingly into a corner.

"Impressive," the prince (was he a prince? He was married to a princess, she supposed technically he was) said, raising a thick blonde eyebrow. "I actually think he bought it. Don't tell me why, I don't need the details, but I'm guessing he's someone you would prefer to have out of the way while all this is going on."

"Yes." Emma blew out a breath. "Can you manage that?"

Kristoff gave her the sort of stung stare common to men everywhere who had just had their prowess questioned, and she raised her hands in surrender. Then he went back out, climbed to the loft again, and as Walsh started into further declamations on the sorry state to which he had been reduced, Kristoff sighed deeply, cocked a fist, and thumped him soundly on the head again. Then he rolled the wizard in a stable blanket, tied it at both ends like a sausage prepared for curing, slung it over his shoulder, and descended into the main stalls. He carried it over to the one housing the reindeer, dropped it in, and the reindeer (Sven, Emma thought dazedly, it had a name) with an aspect of malevolent glee, sat daintily atop it.

"Good boy," Kristoff told him, and fed him another carrot. Then he clapped his hands and turned to Emma and Killian. "Right. What's the plan?"

"Er – " They glanced at each other, momentarily at a loss, until Killian cleared his throat. "I'm assuming that Prince Hans left some sort of lackeys in charge, when he took Anna and flew off to Monaco to intercept?"

"Aye." Kristoff scratched his chin. "But are you suggesting we storm the castle? Three of us – four, sorry, Sven – wouldn't get very far, especially if we didn't have an airship. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to kick their arses, but shouldn't we figure out how to fix the balloon, and then fly off to pummel Hans and rescue Anna and Elsa?"

"You said it couldn't fly again," Emma objected. "It's wrecked."

"I said it couldn't fly again without a miracle." Kristoff eyed her. "You have magic, don't you?"

"What?" Emma felt as if she'd spilled something disgusting down her dress, and everyone was staring at her. She tensed. "How do you know that?"

"Calm down. I've spent a lot of time around Elsa, remember? Yours is different – warmer, for a start, but it's there. Could you do it? Fix it?"

"I – no, I couldn't. I can barely control it. No."

"But you could," Killian interjected. "You put the _Roger_ together barely thinking about it. I've seen the power inside you. You can do it, love."

"That was by accident! Like you said! And it almost killed me!" Emma wanted to withdraw like a turtle into its shell from everyone expecting her to make things better, from Henry with his enchanted sleeping people in Regina's vault, to Kristoff and Killian thinking she could whip Walsh's balloon back into shape and lead the charge to wherever in creation they were supposed to be going now. "I can't."

"We don't exactly have a lot of options, Swan," Killian pointed out tersely. "And while his casa may be our casa for the time being, I can't be the only one who isn't all that eager to continue the acquaintance. No offense, of course."

"None taken." Kristoff looked wry. "Well, if you're not going to repair the balloon or melt the wall, I suppose we could go overland to Sweden. Elsa has a summer palace in Stockholm, there has to be a way to get out there. But it would take a lot of time, and it would be dangerous. Are you sure you can't – "

"No, I said. I – "

"Emma." Killian startled her, taking her hand in his and looking deeply into her eyes. "You're our only crack at this, love. I know you're scared, but if we're going to get back and deal out just desserts, you have to."

"Just desserts for _you,_ you mean!" Emma yanked her hand out of his and backed away. "Why am I not surprised that yourself is the only thing you care about? You nearly got all of us killed with that idiotic stunt at Gold's mansion, and to judge from the way he was slinging fireballs at Jafar right after, you didn't do him any actual damage whatsoever. We've been running from London to Prague to Monaco to Yorkshire and now to Norway, and you've done nothing but dig us in deeper. I am not risking my life to perform magic I don't know anything about and can't control, just so _you_ can go back and retrieve your ship and try to kill Gold again!"

Killian flinched, but said nothing. Kristoff glanced back and forth between them with a frown, then said doubtfully, "We could try asking the trolls, perhaps. But they're more into the business of baffling cryptic wisdom, not useful things like magical transports when you need them."

"Trolls," Killian muttered. "Why am I not surprised?"

However, on hearing the rest of Kristoff's sentence, he froze. "Wait a minute. Christiana has a market, doesn't it? Who trades there?"

The other man blinked. "Merchants from across Europe, usually. But since the blockade and the coup, I haven't seen a single – "

"Never mind that. Have you seen the Irish Travellers there? Bright painted wagons, do tinsmithing and charm work, tend to be numerous and red-headed. Anything?"

"Er. . . from time to time, I think," Kristoff ventured. "But they have a reputation as gypsies and thieves, they're not exactly the most welcome visitors in an honest place of – "

Killian waved that off. "Never mind. It's enough to know they've been here. That means there's a waypoint somewhere in the city, and I can find it, if I have a bit of time. Then, well. . . it means _I_ can get out, at least. You two aren't part of the clan, so I can't be sure, but perhaps I could persuade them."

"So persuade them," Kristoff said ungraciously. "I've stuck my neck out for you and your wife, it seems only fair for you to help with me and mine."

"My w – ?" Both Killian and Emma choked; it was difficult to say who was more mortified by this case of mistaken identity. "Ah. . . no, mate. We're not married. Not in the least. She's a formidable and beautiful woman, but not destined for a one-handed pirate with a drinking problem like me."

Kristoff looked taken aback at the bitterness in the captain's voice, then shook his head. "You argue like you are, at any rate," he commented. "And chin up. I certainly never expected to be marrying a princess of Norway, but here I am. Some of us are just fixer-uppers."

"You're an inspiration to us all." Having evidently reconsidered his previous low opinion of their rescuer, Killian was now regarding him with avid interest. "How did that work with you two? Apart from her not having a nose, it seems."

"That was not a deal-breaker," Kristoff said with great dignity. "And it's simple. When it's true love, there's nothing you wouldn't do. Even if it's your life for hers."

A very strange expression crossed Killian's face at that, and he glanced away. Emma, however, thought it was best to nip this conversation in the bud. "Right then. This Traveller waypoint. It sounds like it's our best option. So, Hook, you're going to find it, and work out how to make them take all of us. Then we can figure out what we're actually going to do."

"As you wish, my lady." The pirate got to his feet, swept her a bow slightly too deep to be entirely heartfelt, and headed out of the stable, with only a slight limp to show for his recent misadventures – unpleasant as it was, Skele-Gro did the trick. That left Emma and Kristoff (one could not entirely count the blanket-wrapped form of Walsh, still getting a faceful of reindeer arse) sitting uncomfortably side by side, faced with the prospect of making small talk until he returned. It had been several minutes when Kristoff finally said, "So, he has it bad for you. You noticed that, didn't you?"

Emma looked down at her fingers, twisted in her lap. "Oh, really? That's unfortunate for him."

"Why's that?"

"I have no interest in talking about this, especially with you." Emma shot him a scorching glare, but if she had expected him to be cowed, she was disappointed; he had an icily regal blonde woman with uncontrollable magic and high emotional walls in the intimate family tree, after all. "He might, but I don't feel that way about him. Let's leave it at that."

Kristoff made a noise that conveyed utmost skepticism paired with the fact that, this once, he had decided to be polite and not say so. That attempt having been shot down, they continued to sit in silence until to Emma's surprise and disquiet, she felt a buzzing in her pocket. Couldn't think what on earth she had in there, reached in – and recoiled.

Sitting in her palm was Killian's military insignia, the one that had belonged to his brother, that Walsh had said was bound by a powerful surveillance spell. But she'd left it behind in the wreckage of the burning balloon, wrapped in black cloth and muted – it wasn't supposed to be able to hurt them, to track them – they were supposed to be _safe –_

As she cupped it in her fingers, a small, pearlescent image rose up like silvery gas, swirling and coalescing into the shape of a face. A moment later, looking somewhat ruffled but otherwise no worse for wear, Jafar smiled at her. "Miss Swan. What a delight."

"I beg your – I _beg_ your pardon?" As if she thought he had somehow reached the wrong person.

"I am, of course, delighted to see that you escaped the minor disaster at your employer's place of residence," Jafar went on graciously. "And that you have found safe harbor in – Christiana, is it? Norway? Well, that is a convenient and perversely fitting place to keep you for the time being, and I _do_ advise that you not even think about trying to leave."

"Excuse me? Do you think I'm – "

"I suppose you a sensible woman. Within limits." Jafar shrugged, then lifted the transmitter on his end, sweeping it around to give her a good long look at where he was standing: on the long, manicured lawn still cut with long scuffmarks where Walsh's balloon had taken off, Applewood Hall sitting serenely in the background. "After all, with Lady Regina unavoidably detained in Edinburgh, and you enjoying the hospitality of the frozen north, there is nothing to stop me and your charming lad from getting very well acquainted. I think I'm going to go in for supper. Maybe help Henry with his Latin. Such a fiendishly difficult language, isn't it?"

"No." Emma's hand had gone numb, even as she was horribly aware of how impotent her denial was. "No, don't you – don't you – "

"Oh, my dear, there is nothing to fear." Jafar's smile broadened. "As long as you stay exactly where you are, and make no move to leave or do anything else until I happen along to fetch you. Otherwise, Latin conjugations are the very least of the torments your son will endure. Do I make myself clear? Ah, I see that I do. Splendid. _A bientôt, ma cherie."_

And with that, and a small pop, he vanished.

* * *

There was a hanging, towering, impossible silence, in which the world seemed to dwindle down to the two of them: her and Will, and the knife that Hans was holding to her sister's neck. Elsa's magic bubbled frantically in her fingers, begging to be used, searing with a cold so potent that it roared on the very edge of control, about to rip her away and sweep her down to drown. She felt burning where her veins had been, pumping molten iron instead of blood – she was too hot, her magic was ice, she was snow, she couldn't survive the thaw – as Jafar's poison worked deeper into her, curling tendrils around her heart, daring her to do it, daring her to die. She would if she had to, to save Anna – but Hans had thrust her in front of him, using her as a human shield, and Elsa was terrified of hitting her by mistake. The world spun in the balance, like a coin flicked with a thumb.

"Oh, you miserable rotten bugger," Will said loudly, breaking the spell. "What a brave fellow you are, threatenin' a girl all tied up – afraid she'd beat you to an idiot pulp otherwise?" Hands up, he moved out from behind Elsa, straight into the line of fire for all the soldiers pointing their muskets at him. "Now go on, shoot an unarmed man, just to get the gold star on your cowardly arsehole award. That'll be a lovely honeymoon present for the queen."

"Stop," Hans ordered, eyes bugging out, knife digging further into Anna's neck, and Elsa moaned in fear. "I'll kill her!"

"And then you will never sleep again, 'specially if you're proposin' to marry the other sister, because the instant you close your eyes, she'll kill your arse so dead they could set you up as a Tory backbencher and nobody'd notice the difference. Just between you n' me, this isn't one of your smarter plans, mate. Then again, you could have realized it was a stinker well before you got to this point, and gone back to tryin' to take over the nearest public convenience, not a country. A really nice one, with brick and runnin' water. I believe in you."

"Shut up," Hans ordered, though with a degree less conviction than previously. His hand dropped an inch, his attention still fixed on Will, and that was his fatal mistake. Anna didn't have use of arms or legs, but she did have her head, and she butted him ferociously under the chin like an enraged ram, making his teeth clack madly and dazing him. Hans staggered backwards as Anna hopped to the edge, caught Will's eye, then jumped.

He braced, and she hit him the next instant, knocking them both flat and sending them rolling across the _Roger's_ deck, as he threw himself atop her in expectation of gunshots. But they didn't come, and he fumbled for his pocket knife, cutting through the ropes until she could struggle free, whereupon she fled straight to her sister.

Elsa caught her and held her tightly, as she glared utter bloody murder at a suddenly pants-down Hans. He still held all the military power, the armed soldiers, the hovering airships, but he had just lost his best trump card, and if Anna strengthened Elsa enough to do magic despite the poison, she could freeze everyone, summon up a howling tempest, call down a blizzard on this pleasant autumn night in Monaco. Will, tasting blood in his mouth, staggered to his feet and planted himself defiantly at Elsa's side, just so there would be no confusion. She shot an odd sidelong glance at him, but did not take her focus off her adversary. "Well?" she demanded. "Why don't you just give up now, Hans, and spare yourself the embarrassment?"

"Me?" Hans glared at her. "You think this is my fault? I was a nice man until you and your little bitch sister made a laughingstock of me – I have _twelve_ older brothers, did you even think of me and what I had to – "

"And let me guess," Will said. "Every one of 'em kicked your bum for bein' a sorry wanker. I applaud the service they did to society, and think you should trot on home to let 'em get going again. Dozen is a lucky number, didn't you know?"

Hans inflated. "I will _not_ listen to a moment more of this folderol and – "

"Oh, please," a bored voice said behind him. "It's no wonder that no one has bothered to teach you the first thing about power and how to use it, dearie. This entire blustering spectacle – pointless. Supremely pointless. Disturbing the peace and quiet of the neighborhood, as well as making yourself look, as our friend Mr. Scarlet points out, a fool."

Elsa went stiff. Recognized it all too well, from endless negotiation sessions first extravagantly polite, and then slickly, charmingly deadly. "Gold."

"Good evening, Your Majesty." Rumpled, soot-and-blood-stained, and looking at the dark edge of insanity himself, rather than the well-groomed public façade he liked to maintain, the President of the Royal Society smiled at her. Then he made a careless gesture, and Hans and the Danish soldiers toppled like dominoes, still with stunned looks on their faces. "I've been trying so long to have a little chat with you, and with young William Scarlet – I _did_ have him safely shut up in the Tower, but it seems to have unaccountably sprung a leak. You will join me for the after-party, won't you? My personal guests. My mansion has been left somewhat disheveled, but we can get it tidied up."

Will and Elsa exchanged a scared look. They knew that if they put themselves in Gold's power, there was only one way for it to end – but they also knew there was no way to fight him. He was too strong, too old, too completely without scruple, and as long as they were alive, it was just possible that they could think of something. Resist, and it all ended here.

Elsa cleared her throat. Held out one hand to Will and the other to Anna, and the three of them clutched tightly. "Mr. Gold, sir," she said, with sweetly poisonous false courtesy. "It would be our honor to join you."


	16. Chapter 16

The Office of Magical Disruptions, Delinquencies, and Disasters in London was a bloody grim place to start with, and the current situation improved it like a tiny pink striped-silk waistcoat on a big giant fat bloke – which was to say, not at all to the point of nightmares. Will had ventured past here in the course of a few previous dishonest perambulations, and always made sure to ensure his prompt exit. It was a glowering Georgian pile in Hanover Square, fenced off by a twelve-foot-high forest of black iron spikes; he had never seen severed heads mounted atop them to rot and wither as moral instruction to the public, as were said to adorn Cripplegate of old, but he suspected it was entirely due to the fact that it might put the older and fussier members of the Royal Society off their tea. After an all-night airship ride from Monaco, packed in the hold like a bunch of ruddy sardines, it looked even more menacing as he and the princesses were marched toward it in the pale, cold predawn air. Uniformed peelers prowled to ensure nobody got any ideas about funny business, and Robert Gold strolled at the front as if inviting them in for tea. _Crumpets are best flavored with a bit of cyanide, eh?_

Inside, the place more than lived up to its notorious promise. Will twisted his head to look, but all he could see were stairways that led into the stygian gloom, oil portraits of previous Society luminaries all looking as if they desperately needed to shit, and here and there an equally dismal knickknack or two. Nothing even worth snitching, which deeply disappointed him; you would really expect them to do better. Then again, what was worth the most in this place was far, far out of reach. Not that he didn't fancy a challenge, but perhaps now was not the best time.

The guards marched him, Elsa, and Anna through the corridors and into a dank, windowless room somewhere in the guts of the house, where they were impressed into three heavy iron chairs that looped silver chains around their arms and legs. Commonsense precaution against potential fey creatures, Will supposed, as well as making it bloody obvious that they weren't getting up (or out) any time soon. He stuck out his chin and his chest and tried to look brave for the ladies, but he knew as well as they did that this was very likely curtains. He'd had a good run. Could say that at least.

They were kept that way, cold and shivering and hungry, exchanging furtive glances and wincing as they tried to pull loose, hearing what sounded like rats nibbling at the baseboards, until the bastard must have judged his work accomplished. The door swung open, and Gold made his entrance.

The sight of him sent a cold grue down Will's back. The president had had time at his leisure to calculate the impression he wanted to make, and the fact that he had not changed out of his bloody, stained, travel-wrinkled suit was an unmistakable one. It seemed to imply that Gold thought it was about to get furtherly soiled, and there was simply no sense in wasting _two_ sets of expensive clothes in the same dirty business. He surveyed his three captives for a long, nerve-wracking moment, then shrugged, extracted a chased-silver case from his breast pocket, and removed a cheroot. Lighting it with a snap of his fingers, he took a long drag, then blew a deliberate fug of smoke into their faces. "Well."

"Mr. – President Gold." Elsa struggled at her chains. "This crude diplomacy does not befit your esteemed status and the respected name of the Royal Society. If you liberate myself and my companions from these lowly surroundings, I will be happy to negotiate a reconsideration of relations between Great Britain and the _Kongeriger_ that will be of benefit to both of our – "

"Pretty words, dearie." Gold took another drag and blew the smoke out again. Will coughed as it went up his nose, then had to fight an urge to yawn. "And indeed, I would be inclined to acquiesce to your request – _if_ the reopening of the aether trade was all I wanted from you. But it does provide us a useful place to start. You will be furnished with transportation to Norway and there melt the great ice wall in Christiana harbor keeping the steamships from departing. Likewise with the restraints on the airships. They will then sail south to London, and as an apology for the inconvenience they have caused, sell their entire aether cargo at a few skillings the barrel. The same will apply for any future shipments, until I decree that it will cease."

Elsa went white. "You'll drive us into ruin."

"Why then, you should have thought of that before you devised your ill-advised little embargo. Furthermore, due to your traumatic experiences, you will issue a proclamation naming Prince Hans of Denmark as regent of Norway and Sweden. You yourself will proceed into dignified retirement in some well-appointed countryside mansion – I'm sure there are plenty of scenic spots for you to choose from. I will provide Hans with enough funds to ensure that the aether farms keep operating. In return, he will manage my interests in the Nordic crownlands. I'd say capably, but we both know that's not the case. Terror ought to keep him nicely in line, however. Do we have a deal?"

"You'll take my crown away from me, put me under house arrest, drive my people into destitution and starvation, turn us into a mere colony for aether dust, give Hans rule over my country, and you expect me to _agree?"_ Elsa choked. "Are you mad or merely – ?"

"Oh, believe me, I expect it not in the least," Gold said genially. "It would, however, make it much easier for all of us."

"You can't make me."

"Come now, Your Majesty. You and I know full well that of course I could _make_ you." Gold's eyes flicked at Anna, then to Will. "Who would you prefer I start with – your sister, or the idiot? You seem inexplicably fond of them both."

Elsa remained chalk-white, except for the ugly flush burning up her slender throat. "If that's your preferred method of inducing cooperation, you had better pray to whatever demon you serve that I do not come through this alive, because otherwise this embargo will be nothing compared to what I will unleash. If it's this sorcery and devilry you call politics, we will pay it back a thousandfold. We have our own magicians. And we have the aether."

Gold's eyes glittered. "Threatening war, my lady? Somewhere in Vienna, Chancellor Metternich just choked on his tea. But yes, yes, do tell me how your loose-knit conglomerate of well-meaning liberal intellectuals would match against the Royal Society. Please."

"Wait and see," Elsa vowed. "If you think you're going to – "

"Or," Gold went on conversationally, "I could just kill you right here and spare myself the trouble. That would, of course, make Princess Anna queen, and as she is also conveniently at hand, she could sign the decrees for me. With the added benefit that she has no magical ability, and hence her capability for causing mischief in the future would be much reduced."

At that, Will whistled. "Oy, I thought His Royal Shittiness was the biggest turd I've ever encountered, but that was before you landed with a splash. Tell me, Bob, did mummy not love you growin' up? There's people you can see about that, you know. Like poor old Archie Hopper, before you shipped him off to wherever godforsaken place you sent the bloke."

Gold turned to him with a glacial expression. "Ah, Mr. Scarlet. Did you have something to contribute to the conversation?"

"Will," Elsa hissed. "Don't – don't try to – "

"Actually," Will went on, ignoring her. "I did. Since I'm goin' to cark it either way, I figure I've got nuffin to lose by telling you exactly what a giant stinking slack-jawed heap of sheep shit you are. Assumin' sheep would even eat you, but I think they've got better taste than that. So in conclusion, I cordially invite you to kiss my scrawny lowborn made-in-Covent-Garden arse."

"Made in Covent Garden?"

"Aye. My mum and dad used to go to the twopenny vaudeville shows there and it was dark in the back, so they'd get up to the odd bit of jiggy. Mum always told me not to go to the vaudeville, otherwise I'd be landed with bad trouble like she was." Will paused. "Occurs to me just now that she was talkin' about me. I resent that."

Gold snorted. "Fascinating as this excursion into your sordid family history is, I fear we must cut it short. You also have a job to do for me."

"Oh, do I? Can I fart in your beef stroganoff? Bubbles it nicely, I'll have you know."

The president smiled, which was somehow more frightening than if he had taken offense. "You're a funny man. A very funny man. I'm sure you'll be cracking wise and mouthing off even as they're hoisting you up by the neck at Execution Dock. How the crowds will laugh then. Your dream, I'm sure. Skulls always smile, you know."

"Well, that was appropriately menacing. I think I even pissed a little. But you're not goin' to kill me if you want me to work for you. Unless you want me to work for you dead. Which sounds bloody awful, I'll be frank. Being dead would be bad enough, and then you'd make it worse."

Anna made a small squeaking noise.

"Find him amusing too, do you?" Gold glanced carelessly in her direction. "Well, we'll all be laughing soon enough. Hence I can forgive you this once. But in the meantime. . . Mr. Scarlet, do you recognize this?"

He reached into his pocket and removed the mutilated, twisted remnants of something made of black metal, holding it up for their inspection. Will blinked, about to be completely truthful when he said he had no idea, when it struck him. It had, in some past life, been a key to the Night Market, but now that the place was defunct, catastrophically destroyed not quite a fortnight ago, surely it was just a useless bit of scrap. If that was the case, however, one would not expect to see Gold clutching it as proprietarily as he was – then again, the man was bloody mental, who knew why he did what he did? Striving for bored nonchalance, Will tsked. "Been scroungin' in the rubbish tip again, Bobbo? You know you're not goin' to find your decency down there."

"You, I am sure, recognize this object and its function?" Gold twirled it between his fingers. "Yes or no will do."

"No," Will said blandly. "No idea."

"And here I was hoping you'd be useful." Gold sighed theatrically, then made a quick gesture. In the next instant, Will's throat constricted as if red-hot cords had wrapped around it, pulling it tight, as he gagged and clawed at his throat – it was choking him, but there was nothing there to pull free –

"No!" Elsa cried, making a convulsive motion as if trying to use her magic, but all that resulted was a pitiful flurry of raindrops and her gasping in pain, staring at her hands as blackened veins coiled across them. She sucked an agonized breath as Anna struggled to hop her chair closer, chains rattling and clinking. "No – "

Gold glanced at her, then dropped his hand, and Will wheezed as sweet, sweet air rushed into his lungs. "Ah. If you can't even stand to watch that, how would you manage if I was to apply something more. . . permanent? Now, as I said. Do you recognize it?"

"I can tell you what you've really got to worry about," Will croaked, rubbing his bruised neck. "She can't melt anything unless you give her an antidote. Your best mate Jafar gave her some sort of poison when he held her captive, so she can't do magic, otherwise it'll kill her. She wouldn't get more than a few icicles into that wall before she'd drop dead. Entirely dead, that is, not just mostly. Dead. _Dead._ Then you're massively inconvenienced, aren't you?"

"And what are you proposing? That if I give her the antidote and hence enable her to carry out my plans, you will. . . carry out my plans as well? You didn't strike me as a candidate for the All Souls examination, Mr. Scarlet, but this seems poorly thought through even for you."

"Well, seein' as you were just talkin' about offing her and making Anna queen, I'm thinkin' you're making this up as you go, mate. Which fine, do that if you want, but you're never going to get that ice wall down otherwise."

Gold considered a moment longer, then smiled. "Very well, Mr. Scarlet. I will administer just enough of the antidote to permit Queen Elsa to melt the ice wall, but not enough that she could possibly pose a threat to me with her magic. Her receiving it will be entirely contingent on your good behavior and cooperation with me. Otherwise, as you so eloquently pointed out, I do have a multitude of backup plans. So. Do we have a deal?"

Will hesitated, but he couldn't see any other way to save Elsa's life. "Fine. Do your worst. Which isn't just a bloody figure of speech with you."

"Excellent." Gold clicked his fingers, and the chains holding Elsa and Anna dissolved into dust. "They shall be taken upstairs and provided for. . . again, as long as you behave yourself. Then we can speak frankly."

Elsa glanced frantically over her shoulder at Will, but he shook his head, telling her to go along with it for now. When they had been conducted out of sight, and Gold and Will were alone, the magician turned back to him. "Now that we're doing business, I may disclose what my intentions are. It has come to my attention that my handling of the Night Market may not have been as complete as I thought, and that a certain renegade is rounding up the stragglers and organizing London's underworld to fight back. A renegade, I understand, you have history with."

Will's stomach began a slow cold descent to his foot. "Oh?"

"Yes." Gold grinned. "You were part of his little club once, before things went. . . wrong? And hence to satisfy your need to take up with thieving outlaws, you threw in with the Captain instead. So here is what I require. You will find a way to make this key work – it won't for me, as I have never been to the Night Market before, but it will for you. Then you will find Robin Hood and his Merry Men and bring them to me to be. . . dealt with."

"Well, if you knew a damn thing about Merry Men, you'd know that fighting back against corrupt and tyrannical monarchs is sort of the bloody job description. And everyone knows you rule Britain, not Vicky and Bertie, so it's no surprise that they think your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries."

"I don't care whether it's a surprise or not. I want them taken down. And you, Mr. Scarlet, are the man for the job." Gold held out the key. "Well?"

"You're killin' me when I'm done, either way, so why should I agree?"

"If you help me catch Robin Hood – you have already given me custody of Killian Jones' precious airship _and_ his crew, so I am sure the man himself will not be long in following – you'll be made a peer of the realm. Full pardon, lifetime pension, some rambling countryside estate – in Nottingham, do you think? And you never know, the queen of Norway might even consider a titled nobleman an appropriate match."

"No idea what you're bangin' on about."

"Sure you don't." Gold grinned. "Shall we get on with it?"

Will hesitated an eternal moment longer. "All right," he said at last. "Fine. We shall."

* * *

"Well," Kristoff said, breaking the sick spell that had hung over the stable ever since Jafar's disappearance. "That wasn't very encouraging."

"Do you think you're being funny?" Emma shot to her feet. "He – he has my son! And that thing still works, we tried to dismantle it but it's still transmitting – we have to do something, we have to – "

"He told you to stay here, remember? And you crashed your balloon, so you couldn't run off even if you wanted to. Or his balloon, whatever." Kristoff glanced to where Walsh was safely stashed beneath Sven's furry arse, although faint muffled noises seemed to indicate that the wizard had awoken and took extreme exception to his current confinement. "So how about we come up with a plan before we do anything stupid."

Emma breathed heavily through her nose, trying to quash the panic bubbling in her stomach. "Right. Fine. Plan." She whirled on him. "You have any ideas?"

Kristoff looked alarmed. "Well, that lutefisk I had for dinner last night may have been slightly off, and I can neither confirm nor deny that everyone thinks I'm insane for talking to my reindeer. Wait, you meant for outsmarting that bastard? Nope. None of those."

"Hilarious," Emma said coldly. "When he attacked the palace, took Elsa, what did he do? Was there any sort of warning?"

"It wasn't him, per se." Kristoff frowned. "Just his minions. And are you even sure that he actually has your son? I'm just saying, the man is a master magician, and a master manipulator. If he can get you to panic and freeze – pardon my choice of words – then he can have all the time he needs to accomplish some other evil plan elsewhere."

"Even if he doesn't, he knows where Henry is, he knows what Applewood Hall looks like, he knows everything about him." Emma whirled on her heel. Her desperate urge to do something, to take action, was warring with the fact that Jafar had warned her to stay where she was on pain of literal death. She loathed this feeling of helpless paralysis, enough to make her grudgingly wonder if Kristoff was right, and it was just what Jafar had wanted to inspire in her. She still had the magical _shem_ that animated the golem; that was reason enough for him to want to capture her, but just retrieving that did not require her to be taken alive. Quite the opposite, in fact. So for some reason, he still wanted her, personally. If he could tie her down here, it would much simplify the task of catching her, especially since she had recently been on a crash course across Europe, but to risk calling it a bluff, to gamble with Henry's life. . .

Emma sucked in a slow, agonized breath. She had no idea what to do or where to go, and was just about to ask Kristoff something else, when the barn door scraped, and a chilly-looking pirate made his reappearance, stamping and huffing. "Well, it's a bloody winter wonderland out there, love, but I think I can – what?"

Startled, Emma glanced up at him; she hadn't said anything, but somehow he had understood that something was wrong. Kristoff did not appear inclined to step in and help out, so finally she said, "Jafar sent us a message. That tracking spell in your medallion still works. He knows where we are, he knows where we've been, and because _you_ took us to Regina's house through the wardrobe, he knows where Henry is. So you've endangered my son, and he's warned us that if I don't stay here, it will be even worse. I hope you're proud of yourself."

Hook looked as if someone had swung something heavy into his face. "I. . . Swan, Emma, I didn't. . . Believe me. I would never have knowingly put the boy in danger. I'll. . . if there's anything I can. . ."

"I don't give a damn whether it was knowingly or not. You did. There's no way I could ever trust you. Besides, what could you do? I have magic. You have one hand."

Hook flinched. "You know I'm good in a fight, love. And Jafar, he – "

"He wouldn't even know about me or be after me if it wasn't for you." Emma hunched her shoulders. "Apparently we _are_ just staying here."

A pause. Then Hook met her eyes and said slowly and distinctly, "Aye. We're staying here and not doing anything stupid. It would be fool of us to cross up Jafar."

Emma was so startled by his assent that it took her a moment to realize his gaze had next flicked, just as significantly, to the medallion, which was still lying where she'd dropped it. It took her only a split second after that to get it. "Of course," she breathed, through gritted teeth. "We're not doing anything he doesn't tell us to."

"Wait, what?" Kristoff glanced between them, frowning. "Am I missing – "

"Nothing," Hook told him. "There are other ways to deal with this situation, after all. We'd never risk jeopardizing the lad's safety, so why don't you two make yourself comfortable while we wait. I'll see if I can go find some food."

"As you order, captain." Emma flashed a tight-lipped smile at him and sat in the straw, while Kristoff remained completely flabbergasted. Then some inkling of comprehension appeared to light on him, and he sank down slowly, looking as if he expected the ground to vanish beneath him. He shot a sharp look at her – _are you serious about this?_ – and Emma nodded infinitesimally, even though she was not, not in the least. But if he actually meant it, if it was their best chance. . . though what she'd do if Jafar actually turned up here she had no idea, probably throw a milking stool at him and run. . .

Hook turned up the collar of his leather jacket and tightened his swordbelt. Then he glanced at her, and their eyes locked for a long moment, as she could almost hear herself begging. _Don't tell me I'm making a mistake. Don't let me down like everyone else. Bring him back._ Then with an effort, Emma turned away. Couldn't say anything, even if she'd wanted to, as the captain ducked through the stable door and vanished in the fog.

"Right," Kristoff said, startling her. "So, there's no point in waiting, is there? Might as well just head up to the palace and hand ourselves in."

Emma searched his face, saw what he was really suggesting, hesitated, then nodded. She scouted through the barn for anything that could possibly be used as a weapon, Gold having relieved her of her derringer and stiletto back in Monaco, while Kristoff whipped a large handkerchief out of his pocket, economically gagged Walsh with it before the wizard could resume airing his grievances, then hauled down a coil of rope and tied him stoutly to a beam. He took Sven by the bridle and led him out of the stall, hoisted a mattock over his shoulder, then followed Emma out into the frigid twilight.

The sun was already well below the horizon, polar night rushing on its way, and the city of Christiana was drowned in a mournful violet murk, far-off streetlamps and glowing windows shining warm and distant in the cold cobbled warrens. Coal smoke pungently scented the air, and Emma coughed when she breathed, eyes watering. A renewed snow was starting to fall, and an ominous iron-grey anvil of clouds hunched on the northern horizon. _Doesn't look promising._

With Kristoff trotting behind her, thinking with every step of what a hare-brained plan this was and how many ways it could go wrong, Emma trudged up the hill toward where the Royal Palace – a magnificent colonnaded estate of pale ivory stone, completed just two years ago – sprawled majestically in its vast courtyard. Squinting through the frosted bars of the front gate, she saw that the _Kongeriger_ flag had been pulled down; apparently they were no longer bothering to paint the coup with even a veneer of civility. The palace looked dark and grim, unwelcoming, under siege, and she turned to Kristoff doubtfully. "How are we ever going to – ?"

He put a finger to his lips, signaling quiet, and she bit her tongue, even though they had left the medallion back in the barn – it wouldn't buy them much time, or confuse Jafar for good, but it might be something. Then Kristoff thrust an arm through the bars, muttered a curse in Norwegian, and fumbled until he got hold of the latch, forcing it open with a scrape and a shriek. He beckoned her in after him and Sven, mouthed, "Follow my lead," and adopted an insouciant stroll across the plaza, as if he had every right to be there. After all, he did, but now did not seem like the best time to assert –

Doing her utmost to refrain from offering advice on how bad his clandestine-entry skills were, Emma trailed after man and reindeer into the great shadow of the portico. Here they encountered another locked door, which Kristoff disposed of by the straightforward expedient of using the mattock to break it down. "I figure Elsa will forgive me for the property damage," he whispered, shoving the pieces out of the way and using his shoulder to jolt Sven through when the reindeer got stuck. He offered Emma a hand, but she ignored it, clambering over the threshold and into the high-soaring marble halls. The chandeliers overhead were unlit, and snow drifted on the floor from several broken windows, which must have been a souvenir from the visit of Jafar's cronies. Their footsteps echoed into the shadows, and Emma could not repress a sudden tenfold intensification of her foreboding feeling. But she squared her shoulders and followed Kristoff across the splendid flagstones, tracking mud everywhere. This was _not_ going to –

Just then, as they rounded the corner, they came face to face with a man in a pale blue riding cloak, clearly on his way to investigate the disturbance at the front door, and without missing a beat, Kristoff decked him with the mattock, looked at Emma, and shrugged. She raised an eyebrow, revised her estimation of his usefulness upward by several notches, stepped over the prone body, and hurried her pace as they wound through the palace's cavernous innards. Then they arrived at another door, which Kristoff likewise unlocked, and entered.

The room was narrow and dark, and clerks' desks lined either side. These were furnished with chittering stenographs, which extruded endless rolls of carbon paper ruled with black type. The air was hot and close, and smelled of ink and sweat, lamp oil and Macassar. At the far end, some contraption of wheels and gears and steam cranked and rumbled, powering the assorted apparatuses, and the bronze wires clicked and screeched. But no matter how imposing the setup was, it was presently manned only by two clerks. At the sight of them, Kristoff barged forward. "Thank God! I've been searching all over! My reindeer has a terrible case of hoof rot, you must take a look at once!"

The clerks stared at each other, then back at him, clearly suspecting that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke. "Sir, are you looking for someone? Or – "

Kristoff grabbed the smaller one by the collar and hoisted him down in front of Sven, who obligingly picked up a rear hoof as the clerk gaped at it. Emma, cottoning onto the plan, seized the other clerk by the arm just as Kristoff said, "Careful, he farts," and the sounds of coughing, choking, and general extreme olfactory distress immediately followed. She whirled the hapless man around and pushed him toward it, then climbed over the brass railing and seated herself behind a stenograph, cranking another roll of carbon paper into it. With barely an instant to decide what she was going to write and to who, she started to type.

On the floor, Kristoff bellowed, "What do you _mean_ this isn't the Ministry of Agriculture?" as the clerks were running in circles, in dual futile efforts to escape Sven's stench and evict this madman from their premises. "I want to speak to a _supervisor!"_

"Sir, we really cannot help you – you are disturbing very sensitive and vital operations – you are under – " one of them babbled, while the other decided that more concrete methods were needed, scuttled to the wall, and yanked on a bell rope. Emma typed faster, finished her message, and spun the gears to send it clacking away into the telegraph lines – just as the door burst open and a squadron of soldiers, a man in the same collared blue cloak bringing up the rear, pelted in. At the same moment, Sven lowered his antlers and charged.

There was a whoop and a yelp as men went flying like ninepins, as Kristoff sprinted across the room to the great gear mechanism that drove its workings. He kicked the treadle and pumped the bellows, and there was a whirring and hissing as steam began to build up in the boiler. Sensing that he might need some cover for this operation, Emma leapt down, seized hold of a heavy bronze andiron, and clocked the first onrushing soldier over the head with it. The rest were skating madly in every direction trying to outrace Sven, the cloaked man was bellowing that they were a lot of useless imbeciles, and as one of them got his musket primed and was taking aim at Kristoff, Emma forked it with the andiron and flipped it across the room, where it went off with a bang and sent a stenograph into hysterics. The air was filled with smoke, indistinct shapes blundering and cursing – then Kristoff yelled, "YOU! DOWN!" and opened the valve.

Emma flung herself flat just in time, as the massive charge of steam blasted out with impossible force. She felt it scorch her hair as it ripped overhead, and heard unearthly yells and howls as it hit the soldiers, lifting them bodily and throwing them out into the hall beyond. As the rest of it was purling out in hot, pulsing gusts, Kristoff sprang down, grabbed the blue-cloaked man, and demanded, "You. Hans left you in charge here, didn't he?"

Apparently too terrified to demur, the man nodded, teeth chattering like a nutcracker.

"Great. You're fired." Continuing to hold him aloft with one hand, Kristoff rooted through his pockets with the other and extracted the royal seal of Norway, which he triumphantly appropriated. "Didn't your mother ever teach you not to take things that don't belong to you? I was raised by trolls and I still have better manners than you. Now – " Kristoff hauled him across the room by the scruff of the neck, and dropped him unceremoniously into the chair Emma had recently vacated. "Write a proclamation explaining exactly how Prince Hans of Denmark violated the sovereignty of the _Kongeriger,_ collaborated with the English Royal Society in black market economic arrangements to bankrupt the Crown, and is presently holding Queen Elsa and Princess Anna outrageously captive. Oh, and say that he's definitely overcompensating for something, and it isn't just twelve older brothers."

"Or – or what?" the underling stammered. "You'll shoot me?"

"Absolutely not." Kristoff folded his arms. "I'll just have Sven sit on your face and fart until you desperately wish I would."

The Danish deputy stared at him, clearly trying to decide if this was both a serious and dangerous threat – then as Sven clopped up, one of the soldiers' blue twill caps dangling jauntily from an antler – grimaced and turned to the stenograph. Emma positioned herself over his shoulder to be sure he was writing what he was instructed to, as Kristoff kept a wary eye on the groaning heap of men outside the door. By this splendid display of teamwork, the missive was completed without interference, and when the man hesitated, Emma poked him in the back with the andiron. "Send it. To all the European capitals, especially Vienna. I don't think Chancellor Metternich is going to be pleased at _all."_ The arch-conservative foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, who had mapped out a strict system for keeping the traditional regime of monarchical authority intact after the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars, Metternich viewed rebellion or usurpation of any sort about as fondly as a large dead rat in an ale tankard. If he got wind of the fact that a Danish prince had tried to upset all of the Nordic countries, and that Elsa's disappearance was not a tragic accident but part of a much larger and far more sinister conspiracy, he would waste absolutely no time in bringing the hammer down.

The deputy hesitated a moment more, glanced nervously at Sven, then sighed, entered the recipients, and dispatched the telegram. Emma exhaled, then raised the andiron on high and administered a brief, sharp clout. The man slumped forward, unconscious, as Kristoff pulled him down, dragged him across the floor with a loud squeaking noise, happened upon a suitable closet, and stashed him in it. Then he turned back to Emma, dusting himself off. "So, I don't know about you, but I think we should make our excuses."

"Agreed." Emma vaulted down to join him, and the two of them scurried out, Sven galloping along behind them. She tried to recall all the turns they had taken to get here, but couldn't, and even Kristoff did not seem to be entirely sure, frowning and reckoning on his fingers. The endless staterooms all looked the same, and all of the windows looked out onto the inner courtyard, so they could not get a fix on where they were in the palace. "Kristoff," she panted. "Kristoff, I think we're lost."

"We're not lost. I live here, I know exactly where we are. . . I think." Kristoff skidded to a halt in the middle of an undoubtedly priceless Persian carpet, looked from side to side, and swiped the back of his hand across his forehead. "All right, fine, I am momentarily perplexed. But wait, maybe it's this – "

Emma, however, was no longer listening. She was staring at something in the corner of the nearest room, which to the naked eye looked no different from any other of its kind, but to her emanated a weird, witchy energy, so she knew in an instant she was not mistaken. Didn't know if they were now saved, or doomed beyond all description.

A wardrobe.

* * *

Killian Jones walked steadily through the falling snow, boots crunching a trail that was quickly erased by the piling flakes, breath steaming silver. Perhaps it was to be expected from Norway in late autumn, not to mention a Norway under magical wintry siege whereupon it did not need the help in the first place, but it was bloody cold, so that he felt sluggish, slow, almost dreamy. Cold enough to kill a man, he wondered? Well, that was one question that would remain firmly in the scientific. Not for him. Not yet, at any rate.

The ground was growing steeper underfoot as he climbed, using hook and hand to keep his balance. The Traveller waypoint was just outside the city, and while there was no guarantee how quickly he could get to where he was going, at least he knew he would, eventually. Would be safe. Then he could think of what on earth he was going to do next.

Guilt niggled at him. He pushed it away. He was Captain bloody Hook, he did no one's bidding and owed them nothing. He had finally finagled his freedom, and since Swan was set on staying behind, he would be mad not to take the opportunity. She was under the impression that he would use the Traveller network to hasten to Yorkshire, ascertain whether Jafar was actually there and in possession of Henry, and then, presumably, do something about it. He could do that, to be sure. Or he could return to London, liberate his ship from whatever escrow the Royal Society had surely put it in, and free his crew from the hangman's noose. Have one last chance to finish the job with Gold, then find Jafar and see the bargain done. He'd be doing the right thing, of a sort. Keeping the bastard away from Emma, from. . .

Killian reached the crest of the hill, panting, and stood gazing at the hedge that contained the Traveller waypoint. It did not look as if any wagons had come through here for a while, as the Travellers more or less kept to the British Isles; he'd have to summon one. But first, he had to be very certain about his destination. London: to save his beloved _Roger_ and his crew, to see his revenge accomplished. Everything his life meant, had been working for. Or Yorkshire: to put himself in fool danger once more, just for the sake of a boy who looked like Bae. _Emma's boy._ Face off against Jafar, if he was there, or God knew what, if he wasn't.

 _I am no hero._ Killian's ship was his only home now, the only thing he needed. Where he had lost the loves of his life, Liam and Milah; turned from naïve lieutenant to blackened pirate. Where he had sailed the skies and fought his wars, pillaged and plundered, shot down Navy airships, outrun storms. Everything. _Women come and go, but a pirate's life is forever._

Against that, Henry was nothing. Nothing. For a woman who had not stinted on making it clear that she did not care for him, and never would?

The choice was clear.

Killian stepped forward, took hold of his crucifix, and whispered the summoning with no regrets.

* * *

Elsa and Anna were escorted upstairs, shut into a gloomy third-floor drawing room, and then once they were sure that nothing else horrible awaited, rushed into each other's arms and held tight, shaking. Elsa buried her face in her sister's hair, breathing deep and raggedly, then finally stepped back, taking Anna by the arms and gazing desperately into her face. "You're – not hurt? Not seriously?"

"I'm – I'm all right. Well, not totally all right – the abduction and Hans trying to kill me again, I mean, there _was_ that, but I'm not hurt. Much." Anna scraped her tangled braids out of her face, turned around and knocked over an end table, hastily put it back in place, then went to the window and peered out over the dreary rooftops of London. "Is it true? Did they poison you so you can't use your magic?"

Shamefaced, mortified that she had once more failed to protect them, Elsa nodded.

"You know what I think?" Anna scratched her chin. "I think it's not poison, not quite. It's just. . . something that makes you afraid and reacts to you feeling scared, so you can't focus and you can't control it. But now I'm here with you, so you can!" She trotted closer and took Elsa's hands in hers. "Let's get out of here and go home!"

"I – no, I can't, it's dangerous." Elsa shuddered. "What if you're wrong, what if it really is poison, it could kill us both – "

"Come on," Anna urged earnestly. "Just try, please?"

Forcing down the taste of bile in her throat, Elsa hesitated, then nodded again. Closed her eyes and focused on their interlocked fingers, trying with all her heart not to be afraid, to be as powerful and confident as she had been only in flashes, when she built the ice palace on the mountainside. _Let it go. . ._ she gritted her teeth, fighting against the pain and panic, until she heard the sound of glass shattering, and her eyes flew open. Icicles the size of javelins had taken out the broad picture window on the far side of the room, and the damp wind whistled in.

Elsa gaped, then hurried over, braced herself as Anna hugged her tightly from behind, and began to weave an ice staircase down the wall of the house to the ground. It hit with a reassuringly solid clunk; she reached out and helped her sister onto it, and Anna started to descend as fast as she could. Elsa stepped out after her, shot another blast at the window to seal it with a pane of ice half a foot thick, then climbed down after her. Once they had both reached the bottom, she readied herself to make the staircase disappear, but something went wrong, and it shot splinters everywhere; they had to duck and cover to avoid having their eyes put out. The splinters each sprang up in a new speleothem of ice, as the courtyard fountain froze over and cracked. The wind swirled and howled, and though she was not five feet away, Elsa could barely see Anna through the white curtain of snow. "It's not working," she moaned. "I can't control it."

"Come on!" Anna grabbed her hand, and they began to run, the ground snapping into hoarfrost wherever Elsa's feet touched it. The high iron fence around the mansion turned to ice and shattered in turn as they approached, and they darted across Hanover Square beyond, in what had become a full-blown blizzard. Elsa kept thinking madly of Will, left behind – they had to go back, they had to save him, but after that infernal bargain he had made for her life, he might already be beyond help – oh God, had she frozen him too –

Anna was pulling at her, half-dragging her, but Elsa could no longer concentrate or breathe. In the distance she could see the great spire of Big Ben freezing over, the Thames turning to a sheet of silver glass. Heard the bells of the city go silent as their clappers stuck to the bitter-cold iron, and a tremendous snapping and cracking ensued underfoot as pipes began to burst – jets of water hissed into the air, freezing instantly and falling in a crackling tinkle. Snow was blowing almost sideways into their faces by now, and Anna's lips were turning blue. "Elsa," she panted. "Elsa! Look at me! Make it stop! I'm here! You can, I know you can!"

No. She couldn't. Whatever Jafar had given her, whether fear or poison, it was too strong. Elsa swayed on the spot as magical winter closed London in its jaws, bright sparks fizzing at the corners of her vision, blackness burning up through her body. Then it reached her head and closed over it like dark water, and she fell into it almost gratefully, and drowned.


	17. Chapter 17

Will Scarlet was halfway down the ladder when everything, as it was wont to do in his life, abruptly went to hell in a handbasket. Released from the Dungeon (as the Office was known in the underworld, and now he bloody well could see why) to get on the business of locating Robin Hood and informing him that he had a date with a hood of a quite different sort if he didn't get his arse out of town swiftish, he had instead first tried to run for it. But he had barely gotten a dozen yards when he remembered Elsa, and the antidote, and that it wasn't fair to weasel off and leave her to get chopped. He'd thought he was through with turning himself into a slave on a woman's behalf, but it seemed he wasn't. Besides, Elsa had done nothing to him, had never asked for any of this, and Will had spent enough time around the Captain to be familiar with the concept of good form, especially in regards to ladies. And while Will, being both a thief and not the brightest bloke to fall off the turnip cart, remained unsure what exactly it was, it sure as hell was not this.

Thinking of Killian gave him a stab; it was a crying shame that the bastard was probably dead. Not that Will would miss him at all, no sir. But that made it doubly imperative that he figure this out, and after a long moment, fighting himself every step, he had turned and ventured down the alley to the manhole at the end, prying it open and limbering down into the underground tunnels. There was a door at the end he had often used to enter the Night Market before, whereupon he intended to try his piss-poor fortunes.

Perhaps it was lucky, then, that he'd never gotten that far. As he was climbing down, one moment he saw his breath in the air, and the next, snowflakes the size of sixpence began pelting down. Ice varnished the rusted rungs of the ladder, slipping out from beneath his feet, so he almost lost his balance and toppled into the abyss. Glancing up at the gasp of grey light clutched in the manhole opening, all he could see was the blizzard.

 _Elsa._ If Will had time to think about it, maybe he wouldn't have done it – but then, as Gold had said, he was no bloomin' genius and lowlife criminal or not, he wasn't a coward. He scrambled up the ladder, scraping his hands and skidding, then popped out of the hole like an organ-grinder's monkey and started to run. Streetlamps were guttering and snuffing, and Will staggered as the howling wind hit him broadside. Doing his best to shield his face, blinking and squinting, he foraged determinedly ahead into the whiteout. "Elsa?" he roared, at the top of his lungs. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but he didn't suppose she could cause this much of a tempest if she was still imprisoned, poisoned and powerless under Gold's thumb. If he had to fight a bunch of bloody werewolves to get to her. . . fine, he would. He'd been bit by one already and cured, they couldn't affect him. Though that wouldn't matter if they tore his head clean off, and assuming he got there in time to make any difference. He ran faster.

Will knew the streets of London intimately, but even he could barely tell where he was. Buildings and steeples and narrow lanes loomed crazily out of the fog, and sounds carried and refracted with no rhyme or reason. He thought he heard faint shouting, however, and angled himself in that direction, praying it wasn't some sort of trick. Shutters banged overhead, avalanching snow onto him, until he must have looked a damn sight like the abominable Bigfoot that supposedly lived in the high peaks of Hindoo India. Wheezing and freezing, he burst free at last – then stopped dead.

Just across from him, Princess Anna of Norway was on her knees, trying desperately to shake awake her unconscious sister. Elsa had collapsed at the very vortex of the storm, as the flakes reeled and tumbled in great cartwheeling swoops. She looked as white and cold as a tomb-effigy carved in marble, and Will felt his gut turn over, confirming beyond a doubt what he'd been afraid of for a while. He gaped for half a moment more, then bumbled furiously across the slick stones toward them. "Oy! _OY!"_

Anna glanced up, saw him, stared, then decided not to waste time in questions. "Help me! She won't – she used her magic to get us out of there, but she couldn't stop it, she – "

Will was already bending down, gathering Elsa and hoisting her against his chest; she felt as light as a snowflake herself. Then he wheeled in a circle, trying to think how in bloody hell they were going to get out of here. If by some absurd miracle they _could_ make it back to the Night Market, if there was still anyone there, they could claim sanctuary, find something to help her. But that was a wager which even a skunk-drunk gambler who had lost all his money at the faro table would think twice before taking, and that wasn't even factoring in the –

"Oh, bloody _hell,_ " Will said again, this time aloud. Evidently deciding that the odds were not yet sufficiently stacked against them, the universe had elected to throw in that extra bit of fun with the growling now echoing from every side of the plaza. _When I said I'd fight bloody werewolves, that wasn't an invitation to send them right along!_ But the monstrous grey shapes now stalking out of the mist could be nothing else, yellow eyes burning malevolently. _Maybe they can shit me out on Gold's doorstep after they eat me._ If there was any way out of this, it was not currently occurring to him.

Anna, however, had not taken advantage of this perfectly valid opportunity to panic. Instead, she pushed him hard in the back. "Run!" she shouted. "I'll hold them off!"

"You?" Will goggled at her. "What're you, some sort o' ten-foot-tall bird with two swords who can – "

"No, but I'm good at fighting wolves, actually! Just get Elsa to safety!"

Will briefly thought about it, but he couldn't countenance having to explain to her that he'd left Anna for evening appetizers and scarpered like a git. "No, I'll handle 'em! You take her, I'll catch you up and – "

At that moment, however, their elaborate wolf-whacking plans were unceremoniously derailed as the first one leapt for their throats. Anna let out a banshee shriek, wound up, and popped it in the slavering jaw, which actually stunned it long enough for Will to seize her and half-carry, half-drag her across the square, dodging behind a statue of some important-looking chap, then scream loudly as his line of sight turned into gnashing fangs and mauling paws. But Anna yelled, "STAY AWAY FROM MY SISTER!" reached out, and slapped it smartly across the snout. Arse once more reprieved from gruesome dismemberment, Will broke free and ran harder than he ever had in his life.

Elsa's head lolled against his chest as he blasted into the narrow maze of half-timbered Tudor townhouses on the far side, their eaves hanging together overhead, then whirled around to see Anna hard on his heels. He pushed her behind him, encumbered by the need not to drop Elsa, and they fled madly into the twisting medieval wynds. They could hear the wolves pounding after them, so close that there was no bloody time for Will to try to open a door with the Market key. The snow was still falling, mounding past their ankles – until at last Will spotted a small stone chapel, one of the countless old city parish churches, and decided that it was now or never. He stole a desperate glance at the sky; twilight was coming fast. Close enough. Or did the old rules no longer apply?

"Here," he panted, clumsily offloading Elsa into her sister's arms, as Anna was heaving for breath and clutching a stitch in her side. Then he fumbled the key out of his pocket, tried to fit it into the latch, and swore as the melted, deformed metal refused to cooperate. The snarls and howls were closer than ever, and Will felt sick with fear as he struggled with it in vain. "Bloody – bloody fucking – "

"Will!" Anna screamed, and he was just about to tell her that he didn't care that she was some pretty highborn princess, this was no time to scold him for swearing, when he saw the wolves round the corner. There was nowhere to go. They were pinned down, with walls on two sides, the door behind them, and the wolves blocking the entrance to the alley. He lunged for the girls, pulling them into his chest – not that it was going to save them, but at least they shouldn't have to _see_ their guts ripped out, please let it be quick and then it'd be over –

The pack leader sprang. Both Will and Anna screamed, falling back onto the door with a crash, Elsa tangled between them –

– and then from nowhere, another wolf leapt out of the shadows and hit the leader head-on, jaws clamped around its neck as the two beasts crashed down like a pair of titans. Their deliverance was so improbable that Will could only stare – thought for a mad moment he recognized the newcomer – back at the Tower when the Captain and Miss Swan were springing him, there had been a third person with them, but that one had been left behind in the chaos, and he'd thought they had been a –

At any rate, there was no time to dwell on it. He wrenched madly at the door, giving the broken key a final, desperate twist, and somehow, it clicked. Then it swung open, and he grabbed the princesses, pulled them through, and used his last presence of mind to kick it shut behind them. They stumbled, fell down a set of steps, rolled, and banged to a bloodied, snowy, sobbing, gasping halt in a totally undignified heap, somewhere in the pitch darkness.

Will lay on his back, Elsa sprawled atop him, thinking that in other circumstances he might be quite keen on this, as he could hear Anna moaning next to him. With an immense effort, he gathered himself, sat up, and croaked, "All right, then?"

"I – I think so. Ouch. I'm so sorry, I think I tripped." He heard Anna groan again, and then a rustling as she slowly reoriented herself. "El – Elsa?"

"She's – intact." Will _thought_ so, but in the absence of all light, could not be sure. He boosted her dead weight into his arms again and got to his feet slowly, blood rushing to his head and making him reel. Normally you'd see the Market by now, but with it destroyed and its denizens in hiding, who knew what awaited them down here. If the Market was even where they had ended up.

Will resolutely pushed that thought away. They were presently not being devoured by wolves, which was a bright side, and hence they at least had a chance to get into a new horrible life-threatening situation. Once his lungs had stopped trying to tear themselves out of his chest and his vision had cleared, enabling him to see nothing more effectively, he started to walk.

They descended into the darkness, groping along by touch, and since Anna did not have Elsa to carry, she took the lead. Will could hear running water far off, but there was an intense chill in the air around them, and it froze solid as they passed. He was just wondering if they'd be eaten by rats or die of cold first, when down the tunnel, he saw the flare of a torch, and a huge shadow behind it. A shadow he might just recognize. "Oy there! Hello?"

"Halt!" The torchlight bobbed closer at speed. "Who goes there?"

Suspicions confirmed, Will cleared his throat and smiled as brightly as possible. "Slap my arse and paint me purple! Little John!"

Little John, who was the exact bloody opposite of little, scowled at him darkly from behind a loaded crossbow, the business end of which he was pointing in Will's face. "Scarlet. We didn't expect to see _you_ again."

"No, you probably didn't, but life is full of surprises, eh? It's a pleasure to see _you,_ I must say. You been on a new diet? You look great. Well, still fat, but then you always were. Less fat, I mean. Muscular. And your hair is. . ." Will flailed. "Bushy. Very bushy. And, ah, fearsome. You look like a Viking. 'Cept without the whatchamacallit. Horny cap. Though you could be horny, I wouldn't know."

Little John glared at him. "What are you doing here?"

"Rescuin' a couple of fair maidens, what's it look like? I also helped an old lady cross the street and nearly got eaten by a bunch of bleedin' wolves. Look, even if you want to chuck me out, she needs help." Will held out Elsa. "Is Robin here?"

"Why's it your business?"

"Did you miss the part where I said nearly eaten by wolves? Could be I pissed off the Royal Society good and proper, and if Robin's doin' what he's supposedly doin', he's got to take me in, huh?"

Far from reassuring Little John of his bona fides, this only made him scowl harder. "What? Who told you that? Nobody's dared to go above ground."

"Ah. . ." Oh, hell. It had been Gold who told him, of course, but somehow Will had a feeling that furnishing this as an answer would end very badly. "Let's just say the grapevine."

The big Merry Man looked even less convinced, but if his heart was unmoved by Will's tale of woe, taking in the bloody, bedraggled state of the girls seemed to soften him somewhat. He grunted and jerked his crossbow. "Fine, then. Come on. But one wrong move, Scarlet, I'm warning you. . ."

"Thank you. Thanks very much. I always did like you."

Little John snorted, but shepherded them down the passage, across a narrow metal catwalk with some black river rushing far below, and through a minotaur's labyrinth of passages until they finally emerged into some expansive subterranean chamber, lit dimly with lamps and torches that spread like fallen stars into the darkness. It was here, huddled in small groups, some in their tents and others sitting mournfully atop their remaining wares, that the survivors of the Night Market attack, the ragged remnants of London's magical underworld, had gathered.

"Looks, ah. . ." Will considered. "Very. . . very homely."

"Shut up. It's a bloody refugee camp. After _you_ poked the Royal Society in the eye once too often by stealing that compass from the Great Exhibition."

"Oy, that's not fair. They've wanted to kill us for years, my contribution couldn't have had that much to do with it."

"Aye, they've wanted to kill us for years, and a few days after you, they succeed in doing it? I'm onto you. You led them here somehow, trying to save your own neck."

Will flinched. He hadn't done it the first time, but he _had_ this time, and it bothered him more than he expected. Fortunately, it was dark, and Little John didn't notice. "Right. Robin?"

"Wait here." Little John indicated a spot, which Will occupied with elaborate precision, and strode away across the cavern.

Will waited, Anna hovering close next to him, his arms starting to ache with carrying Elsa, until at last Little John returned with his leader in tow. Tall, rugged, scruffy, sandy-haired, wearing a scaled-leather gambeson, green cloak, and bandolier, longbow and quiver slung over his shoulder, Robin Hood's gaze was cool and flat as he surveyed his erstwhile Merry Man. "Will."

"Howdy." Will shifted from foot to foot. "I'd offer a handshake, but my arms are a bit full. How you doin'? How's the little tyke? Roland?"

Robin studied him without immediately answering. But he nodded to Little John, who beckoned to Anna and held out his arms, clearly in expectation of receiving Elsa. Will instinctively clutched her closer. "Oy, no stealin' my girl."

"Your girl?" Little John repeated, with unflattering skepticism. "What happened to the other one? Anastasia? The one you screwed us over for?"

"She's gone, that's all you need to know, and why don't you just give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice in it? That was a bad decision, we can agree. But I'm here now. Doesn't this look like a trustworthy face? Would this face deceive you?"

"Probably."

"Hey now. I'm a thief, but I'm no liar."

Little John and Robin regarded him a moment longer. Then Robin said, "We're just going to see if there is anything we can do for her. That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"Aye." Will reluctantly handed Elsa over, and watched Little John carry her away, Anna trotting after him with three steps for every one of his. He waited until they were alone, then turned to Robin. "So. Got something to say."

Robin made an only slightly sarcastic gesture of assent. "Of course."

"Right. Through an unfortunate twist of fate having nothing whatsoever to do with me, Robert Gold has learned about the survivors down here, and he's plenty peeved and no mistake. So he gave me a Night Market key and told me to come down here and rat you out. I agreed, but for a good reason, I swear – to save Elsa, as long as he held her prisoner. Well, now she's here so that plan's scuppered, but I had to warn you that you might want to, you know. Take a holiday for your health. Get out of the city. I hear Yorkshire's lovely this time of year."

As Will glanced warily at Robin, bracing himself for a reaction, he instead found the other man staring at him in confusion. "Well? Are you going to say it or what?"

"Weren't you listening? I just did!"

"No, you didn't say anything."

"Yes, I did! About Gold and how he's tryin' to use me to smoke you out and. . ."

At this, Will was suddenly conscious of a terrible pressure on his throat, akin to how he had felt when Gold had magically strangled him back at the Office – and then in a horrible flash of clarity, he understood. _Bloody hell. The bastard's put some kind of spell on me, so I can't warn him. Can't tell him the truth._ "Just. . . just get out of here," Will tried, eyes watering. "Before. . ."

Robin's confusion was swiftly turning to annoyance. "This isn't bloody funny, Scarlet."

"I. . ." Will clawed at his neck, struggling for breath. "I'm serious, mate, run. . . run for it!"

Robin looked at him with an expression of anger, incomprehension – and, which cut oddly the hardest, disappointment. Then without another word, he turned his back and strode away.

* * *

"What are you staring at?" Kristoff prodded, when Emma remained motionless. "It's just a wardrobe. Kind of an ugly one, granted, but – "

"No, shut up." Emma advanced on it in terse expectation of something terrible happening. She couldn't feel any magic in it, yet, but that didn't meant it wasn't there, and she couldn't decide if that was for better or worse. She put a hand gingerly on the door, then pried it open half an inch. Still nothing.

Kristoff looked even more puzzled. "I doubt the clothes are going to leap out and strangle you, if that's what you're worried about. Or are we supposed to get in and hide? Because you know it would only fit me and you, Sven would be out of luck. Sure, that would be inconspicuous, a wardrobe in an empty room with a reindeer sitting in the middle of it. That would just scream, 'Nope! Definitely nobody here! Keep looking, friends!' "

"I _said,_ shut up." Emma pushed the door open wider, revealing nothing but the back of the wardrobe, complete with a bare coat hook. So perhaps it wasn't connected to the network, which gave her a lurching stab of hope. Gold and Jafar were watching the established ones, but if she could figure out how to open this one on her own. . . it was still a terrible risk, but it might just work. Her brain whirred furiously, weighing up what she stood to lose, and on impulse, she decided to go for it. After all, she couldn't trust Hook. If she let him go, that was already more than he deserved. He was probably well on his way to freedom without a glance back, and that was nothing to her. Nothing.

Mind made up, Emma squared her shoulders and summoned up her magic. It made her hands sting and spark, but after several minutes of intense effort, she had succeeded in doing nothing more than nearly setting it afire, which Kristoff had to hastily extinguish with the rug. "Right, so. Good effort, but we really need to try something besides amateur arson if we're going to – "

"I almost had it!" Emma protested. "And – "

Both of them were interrupted at that moment, however, as the wardrobe began to glow an eerie, iridescent blue, starting as a small pinprick and swiftly blossoming along the panels and doors, bathing itself and them alike in the witchy radiance. Sven started, and Kristoff reared back in surprise. "Wait – did you do that?"

"I don't know!" She had just been picturing Yorkshire and the wardrobe in the attic of Applewood Hall as hard as she could, trying to force through a connection, thinking of how desperate she was to save Henry. "If it worked, though. . . look, I know you're attached to your, um, friend, but like you said, he's not going to fit in there. You'll have to leave him behind to cover our retreat, or something."

Kristoff looked leery at this prospect, and Sven (so much as a reindeer could be said to have facial expressions) indignant. But neither of them could deny it, and Kristoff slapped his counterpart on the haunches. "Take care and don't eat too many carrots, all right, buddy? And make sure that creep in the stables doesn't escape until we get back with Anna and Elsa."

Sven snorted in apparent assent, then clopped out of the room, just as the blue light had grown almost blinding. Emma was almost sure she could see an opening, a doorway into the neverwhere, and turned to Kristoff. "On three, all right? One – two – "

She never got that far. Just as the last number was forming on her lips, the glow concentrated inward, then blew out like an exploding star, in a rush of white-hot roaring that threw both of them violently off their feet. For a moment Emma thought the portal had collapsed, might galvanize a reaction that would not stop until it devoured everything – but it was still open, yawning wider and wider, and she could see something, _someone,_ taking form in the brightness –

For one last frozen heartbeat, Emma's brain refused to accept what her eyes were telling her. Couldn't comprehend the magnitude of her error, couldn't do anything but gape in dumbstruck horror as the silhouette grew larger and more distinct, until at last, with no more concern than as if he was out for a stroll on a fine spring day, Jafar stepped out of the wardrobe and shut it primly behind him. He wore an elegantly tailored pinstriped suit, a starched cravat, a fashionably cut carriage cloak, a beaver top hat, and gloves of black leather, with which he casually grasped a carved, snake-headed bronze staff. "Ah, Miss Swan," he said, flourishing a half-bow. "Good morning. Or is it good afternoon? I _was_ just in England a moment ago, I can't be quite sure."

"Whoa." It was Kristoff who spoke, as Emma was still mute. "I don't know who _that_ is, but I'm pretty sure his name starts with Bad and ends with News."

"Indeed." Jafar flashed a white smile. "Let me be the first – and I do mean the first, likely in your entire life – to applaud you on your perspicacity, Mr. Bjorgman. Oh yes, you see. I _do_ know your name, and a great deal more about you besides. We didn't have time to chat the last time I was in Norway, but you'll have to invite me for tea one of these days. Or no, I'm sorry. It's a bit _déclassé_ to drink Darjeeling from a barnyard trough."

Kristoff stared at him a moment longer, and then it clicked. "Son of a bitch! _You're_ Jafar! The one from the evil singing head telegram! The one who arranged to have Elsa kidnapped, who – " He wheeled to Emma, looking betrayed. "You didn't – _bring_ him here, did – "

"Of course I didn't!" Emma blurted out. "He – he was in Yorkshire, he – "

"Told you to wait here until I popped along to fetch you," Jafar completed smoothly. "For such a contrary woman, I am pleased with your ability to follow instructions for once. Unfortunately, we _don't_ need the ice master, so I'll just get rid of him for us, shall I?"

"Oh no." Emma, recovering from her shock, was already preparing for a fight, feeling hot and lightheaded and strong as magic coruscated through her veins. Back in Monaco, she had seen him flick off Gold's attacks as carelessly as croquet balls at a garden party, but if nothing else, she was not going down meekly. "You are not – "

Jafar's gaze moved to her sparking hands. He appeared even more amused. "You don't need to do that, you know. I am, after all, doing you a favor. Come to London with me, and you can realize your full potential – as well as, of course, revenging yourself on the pirate captain. I do hope you weren't expecting him to come through for you."

Emma felt a chill shiver her from head to foot. The white heat of her magic flickered and dimmed. "What are you talking about?"

Jafar clucked his tongue reproachfully. "What do you think? I lingered rather longer than I wanted to in Yorkshire, just to see if he'd come by to make a misguided attempt at rescuing your son. Just out of curiosity. I always like to know what my foes and friends alike are made of. But he didn't. He is long gone, my dear. Fled heavens knew where to pursue his own interests, which doubtless do not coincide in the least with yours any longer. Likely to London, however, as that is where his ship and crew have been placed into custody. And as for Henry. . ."

"What?" Emma almost screamed. _"What?"_

"It was regrettable. He was a likely lad. But such are the fortunes of war." Jafar sighed. "Now, are you coming or aren't you?"

She couldn't breathe. "You're lying."

"Am I? Use your skill. Find out." Jafar held his hands out. "I am an open book."

Emma tried, but she couldn't. She was too rattled, too shattered, too raw. Hook had betrayed her, Henry. . . she didn't even know what he. . . once more she tried to summon up her magic, but it only flickered feebly and went out. She had only felt like this once before, when Neal had fled without a word in the night: heartbroken. She tried to tell herself that it was good, that she had expected Killian Jones to do no different, but it hurt too much. She couldn't separate herself from it. Couldn't put her wall up and hide behind it again. Was completely and beyond all measure crushed.

"You. Swan. No, don't do it." Kristoff took a step. "Don't listen to him, don't – "

Once more, a step was as far as he got. Jafar thrust out the snake-headed staff, a burning red light scorched from its eyes, and Kristoff was launched across the room, crashing into the wall on the far side and sliding down it. His head lolled at an awkward angle. He did not get up.

"There," Jafar said pleasantly. "Quite the comically low standards the women of the House of Bernadotte have these days, wouldn't you say? Next thing you know, the queen will be marrying a common street thief. Or would, if she was going to live long enough to do so, which she isn't. Now, my dear. How many pieces would you like to come back to London in? I am entirely amenable to any option you select."

Emma's mouth opened and shut uselessly. She shot a glance at Kristoff; she didn't _think_ he was dead, or maybe she couldn't bear it if he was. Someone else she had damaged, another good reason to shut down, to shut away. She didn't even attempt to struggle as Jafar crossed the floor and took her hand in his, closing his long black-gloved fingers over the delicate bones of her wrist. "Come," he said silkily. "There is so much awaiting you, awaiting _us,_ in London. You must wonder who you truly are. The secrets of savants are something as yet unexplored, and you. . . well, with you it is even more remarkable. We will study the laws of magic together, and indeed, even break them, refashion them to suit ourselves. That rage you feel, that desperation, that fury and betrayal? Give into it. Give in. It is what will truly make you powerful. Your whole life has been leading to this moment. Do not waste it. Do not let your boy die in vain."

Emma wanted to say something, wanted to scream, wanted to fight, but she couldn't. Her back had been broken, the defiance drained out of her. She remained utterly silent as Jafar waved his free hand at the wardrobe, and it yawned wide again. Somewhere in the distance, she thought she glimpsed the snow-shrouded spires of London – something struck her as strange about it, though she could not say what – and then the brightness, stronger and stronger, was consuming everything, and it was gone.

* * *

It was well past dark by the time Killian Jones, sore and starving and smelling strongly of the less pleasant aspects of dog (having been forced to share quarters in the back of a Traveller wagon with a very large, very unwashed, and very friendly Irish wolfhound) finally stumbled out into a lightly falling snow, which crunched deeper and deeper as he toiled up the road. His breath billowed silver, the cold made his stump ache, and he was of the decided opinion that having two hooks might not be so bad, as at least then his bloody hand wouldn't feel as if it too was about to fall off. He huffed and tramped and trudged, comforting himself with a swig of rum, but the flask was almost empty and no matter how much he shook it, only a few sticky droplets spilled out, congealing in golden icicles. He swore, threw it into a snowbank, then regretted the decision, went to retrieve it, and kept on walking.

It felt like half of eternity before the road finally bent up across the bridge, and he forced his abused, unhappy body to greater speed. Bloody hell, he was too late, just like everything else in his wretched life. He should be able to see the lights by now, he should be here. Not that there _was_ much to see. Not that he was even sure he wanted to.

At last, starting a horrible stitch in his side, he gained the drive and sprinted up. His bad feeling grew exponentially stronger with every stride, and was confirmed in spades when he burst clear of the shrubbery and got a good look. Windows broken, every light out, the manor standing stark, black, and violated atop the hill, like a half-burned corpse. The carriage house was still smoking, and deep gouges showed where someone or something had been summoned to the attack. The front door was staved in. If it had been sacked by the Turks and left desolate for fifty years, Applewood Hall could scarcely have looked worse.

"HENRY!" Killian didn't remember forming the name on his lips, not consciously, but it burst out of him anyway, a deep, ragged roar. He reached into his jacket, removed a pistol, and cocked it, vaulting through the splinters and into the dark, frigid, empty mansion. He shoved the rubble of broken knickknacks and torn wallpaper aside, shattered glass and porcelain crunching under his boots. "Bloody hell. . . bloody hell. . . _Henry!"_

His eyes swept the deserted hinterland madly. Something moved in the dimness – he spun around and pointed the gun at it, but nothing was there. It must have been his own shadow, his imagination, or he didn't want to think what. He could hear rustling and skittering, peered out through the broken rosette window and could see something else moving on the lawn. He sprang up onto the stairs and pelted into the upper floors. "HENRY!"

At last, high above, he heard an answering cry. He put on an extra burst of speed, nearly retched with the effort as he somersaulted into the attic stairway, and finally caught sight of a small white figure at the end. Henry, who had clearly been hiding for hours, cold and terrified, crawled through the shards, then rose unsteadily to his feet and stared at the pirate in disbelief. "You – what are _you_ doing here?"

"No matter, lad," Killian panted. He couldn't help but deride himself for not finding a way to get here faster, drinking his way through the journey; why was the rum always gone? _Useless. Worn out, dried up, old, broken, drunken derelict._ Small wonder he had failed again. He thumbed open the magazine of the gun, checked that it was loaded, then gave Henry a hard shove in the back. "Run. Up to the wardrobe, try to get to Lady Regina in Edinburgh. Just get in, close the door, and think of it very hard. Don't stop, no matter what you hear."

Henry goggled at him. "What – "

" _RUN!"_ Killian bellowed, as the window at the end of the hall smashed and something dark and winged soared in. He fired at it; it went spinning away and crashed in an explosion of foul-smelling smoke. He thought he heard Henry running for it, but couldn't spare a moment to look. Fired again, but this time the pistol jammed, and the ball only spat feebly to the ground. _Trap. It's a trap._ He wasn't sure how, but in that instant he knew it was – somehow, somewhere, he had sprung it. He swore and tossed the useless gun aside, ready to fight with hand and hook, even teeth if need be, but then the smoke cleared, and a short, stout figure in an almost ludicrously villainous getup – houndstooth suit, fedora, and monocle – came waddling through. It took Killian by surprise enough that he merely stared, and this proved to be his fatal mistake. Something clocked him in the head, and then he was flat on his back, staring up at the newcomer from a deeply unpleasant angle. _Bloody. Hell._

"That's it?" this apparition demanded. _"That's_ the clown we've been waiting for?"

"I beg your bloody pardon?" Killian forced himself to get to his knees, whereupon he was promptly thrown back again by a boot in the chest. "I didn't risk my damn neck just to be called a clown by some upjumped – "

"You got a problem, pinky?" Monsieur Monocle leaned down, whereupon his breath nearly incapacitated Killian again. "Where's the kid?"

"Maybe if you weren't such an incompetent, cut-rate evil minion, you'd know, eh?" Summoning up the last of his battered sangfroid, Killian flashed a sleek, predatory grin. "Running around parroting everything Jafar says? Not much of a future in that."

"Stuff it, handless. We'll find the kid, believe me. Once we get done showing your girlfriend how much of a cretin you are." Minion looked inordinately pleased with himself, then clicked his fingers. More black-suited thugs emerged from the shadows, carrying ropes and chains that were clearly intended to be used on Killian. He whirled around, peering desperately down the hall, but no sign of Henry. _Please God, let him have got away._

"You sure about this, Iago?" said one of the thugs doubtfully. "The boss wants _him?"_

"Of _course_ I'm sure, you twerp!" Iago – as he was apparently called, fittingly – snapped. "We're takin' him to London and that's that!"

Killian laughed out loud, which did not go down well with the brute squad. He spread his arms to either side, feeling downright reckless. "Fine," he said. "You do that, then. After all, there are – what, a dozen of you, and only one of me. You must not fancy your odds."

Iago reached into his overcoat and produced not his nether regions, which would have been terrifying, but only a very large blunderbuss, which was not. He cocked the gun and braced it against his shoulder. "Boss wants you alive. . . mostly. The mostly part was left up for some wiggle room, though. What's it going to be?"

"Oh, I'd put my hands up." Killian grinned. "But I only have one, so. . ."

And with that, he lunged.


	18. Chapter 18

The first thing Emma was aware of was the soaring, silent space above her, and the cold stone pressed against her cheek. She felt utterly drained, used up and wrung out, and it took several more moments for memory to percolate through her battered brain. The wardrobe in Norway. . . Jafar. . . him archly telling her that Hook had betrayed her and Henry was dead, that she should give into her panic, her fury and pain. . . Kristoff slumped lifelessly against the wall, the door swinging open, and falling through the cracks into. . . wherever _here_ was. The most awe-inspiring place Emma had ever seen, in fact, greater even than the towering columns and brooding statuary of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Massive Gothic spires and hanging filigree, a dark wood choir and balcony, dim light weakly illumining magnificent windows. . . another cathedral, then, but. . .?

Emma's questions cartwheeled fruitlessly in her head as she stared around. It looked familiar somehow, as if the name was on the tip of her tongue and could be reached if she just tried hard enough. Then as she started down the aisle that ran parallel to the main sanctuary, she spotted something that sent a bolt of lightning through her. The ancient, high-backed wooden chair stood by itself, remote and majestic, on a dais, with a drawer beneath the seat containing a square stone about the size of a large leather-bound dictionary. Even Emma's untrained sensibilities could detect the currents of strong old magic and tightly woven enchantments that coruscated around it, disturbing the air ever so slightly with their glimmering edges and soft sighs. The Chair of St. Edward, used in the crowning of British monarchs for over five hundred years, and the Stone of Scone, which had performed the same function for Scotland since time immemorial (at least until the English, during the Scottish Wars of Independence, had taken it south in the year 1296, and not troubled to return it). And at this, Emma realized where she was. _Westminster Abbey. I'm in Westminster._

She revolved on the spot, even more confused. As the literal and figurative seat of British power, the place was heavily guarded both magically and mundanely. Only Queen Victoria and her family, the Royal Society, members of Parliament, and peers of the realm were permitted to attend services here, and since any number of treasures were likewise stashed in its vaults, any trespassers were dealt with harshly. How had Jafar just opened a door into here, and what did he even think –

Jafar. Emma whirled around, half-expecting to find him directly behind her, but no. This, however, did nothing to assuage her mounting unease. He would hardly have gone to the trouble of kidnapping her and dragging her here just for her to wake up and be on her way, and she was not entirely sure she wanted to find out what would happen if she tried to leave. Besides, why would she want to? There was nothing out there but the ravening clutches of the Royal Society and doubtless a price on her head, and Hook was gone, Henry too, they'd all left her, through their own choice or someone else's. . .

Emma shook her head, trying to clear out the insidious whispers, ordering herself to believe that Jafar was simply lying and manipulating her, but even if it was, it didn't matter. His poisonous words had done their work, burrowing under her skin, spreading cracks through the always-fragile foundation of her own confidence in herself and the world. Challenging him would have required the certainty that for some unfathomable reason Hook had kept his silent promise and gone to save Henry, for Emma herself to believe that she was worthy of trust and devotion, and that the world would not rip from her hands everything she had ever loved. She had none of those. She was alone. She would always be alone.

She squeezed her eyes shut, briefly fighting tears, but just then, something hot burning in her fingers made them fly open again. Then she stared. Her hands were sparking and spitting, throwing out eerie white bursts of magic that splintered away across the floor, and the defensive enchantments surrounding the Chair began to glow warning red in response. Emma backed away, trying to muffle her hands in her cloak, but they kept exploding, with a sensation as if she was being repeatedly punched in the stomach. If they didn't stop, the magic emplaced to keep impostors from the seat would take her as one such – the Jacobite supporters of the deposed Stuart house claimed that George of Hanover and all his descendants had to work special black magic to sit in the Chair at their coronations without being incinerated – and dispense a similar fate to her.

Yet the more she tried to force her magic to stop, the more it spun out of rein, until the high vaults of Westminster echoed and flashed as if with a fireworks show. Terrified, Emma dove behind the nearest tomb as a beam of blood-red light lanced out from the Chair and vaporized a tall marble statue – she hoped it wasn't anyone too important, but that didn't matter, she couldn't stop it, she'd kill herself and possibly all of London if it didn't –

At that moment, a pair of shiny black riding boots appeared, strode deliberately up to her, and stopped. "Here, my dear," a familiar voice said. "Put these on. They will help."

Emma was so desperate that she did not ask a single question. Instead, she snatched the offered pair of powder-blue evening gloves and stuffed her hands into them. She could still feel her fingers spitting, but the tumult died down, the out-of-control ricochets shorted out, and a ringing silence thundered over the vast halls of the Abbey. Still trembling, she looked up at Jafar – it was him, of course, immaculately manicured and turned out in a collared black suit that made him resemble a vicar or an Oxford don, snake-head staff replaced with a dapper brass-tipped walking stick. "Th-thank you," she gritted out, still gasping.

"Of course, of course." Jafar made an elegantly self-effacing gesture, then waved a hand, and the last remnants of magical ruckus faded. "Now, Miss Swan, I propose we discuss what we are going to do for one another. My opening gambit has, of course, been struck." He nodded at the gloves. "Though I can take them away just as easily. Would you like that?"

Emma clenched her fists. "No."

"Good. I thought that." Jafar smiled sleekly, as pleased as a cat that had just caught a fat mouse. "So then. Let's have a chat. You will have doubtless observed the peculiar properties inherent to the Chair, and its tiresome tendency to launch fireballs at those it deems interlopers or pretenders to the rule of Britain. But we have made trial of your skills in St. Vitus already, and I was pleased that you passed with flying colors. As well as obtaining an item of some use, which we shall discuss shortly. So then. Clearly you see that your task is simple. Remove the defensive enchantments surrounding the Chair and the Stone, and we shall be in business."

Emma stared at him suspiciously. "Why?"

Jafar looked surprised. "Only because that chair, aside from signifying the true and complete rule of the British Empire, is the repository of over half a millennium of magic. At every new king or queen's coronation, His and/or Her Majesty's personal sorcerer would replenish it, and add something new – a goodwill offering to the realm, if you will. Spells that today's deluded and inept bureaucratic fools who presume to call themselves magicians cannot even imagine. They have been asleep too long. Everyone has. It is time to wake up."

"And what are you going to do with all this power, once it's unlocked? Feed widows and orphans? Build houses for beggars? I doubt it."

Jafar's eyes glittered. "That is not your concern, Miss Swan. And may I remind you that you are in a rather precarious bargaining position? Aside from the gloves, there was also that useful item I mentioned earlier." With a swift, sharp gesture, he unfolded his clasped fingers to reveal the _shem_ with its blood-inscribed letters, the enchanted paper stolen from its statue guardians in Prague, which Emma had carried with her to keep Hook from handing it over to this very man. _Fat lot of good that did._ "If you do not comply, I will raise the golem and have it destroy not only London, but all of England, stone by stone, until you do. Thanks to you, this is no longer an empty threat. You brought me what I needed. This."

Emma stared at him. Could almost hear the whirring as pieces fell into place. "Is this what you've been after this whole time?"

Jafar shrugged. "Possibly. Possibly not. You see, I do not customarily divulge my plans in full, or in honesty. I tell what is needed to various assistants to induce their cooperation, have them believe what is useful, and take action accordingly. If you survive the unbinding – an outcome which is made far more likely by you agreeing to accept my help, by the by – you could be most enlightening to me, Miss Swan. What are savants made of? What is in them to defy the laws of nature? And how can this power best serve its proper masters? If you let me study you, just think of all the achievements to be realized, the furthering of sorcery and its purpose in the modern world."

"I'm not keen on the idea of serving as your twisted little mad-scientist experiment. Thanks."

"Shame, because it would be much easier for us all." Jafar tipped a languid, one-shouldered shrug, twiddling the _shem_ between his long fingers. "And if you try to attack me or run away or anything else of a regrettable nature, I will likewise release the golem. You are not strong enough to match against me, and you never will be. And you still have something to lose, Miss Swan."

"What – "

"As I remarked earlier, I say what is needful at the time. It could be that your son Henry is alive and free, far from my clutches at all, and I lied. Or it could be that I have him in captivity now, and his fate depends entirely on the choices you make. Do you want to gamble with that, my dear? The captain already did something similar, back in Monaco. He used your life as a wager. That is how much you mean to him. Oh dear, I do hope you weren't developing any. . . _feelings._ That would be awkward."

Emma's voice felt caught in her throat. She wanted to deny him, to fight back, to tear him limb from limb, but she didn't know how and she didn't know why. The only option she could see was either to rip off the blue gloves and hope that the accumulated charge would be enough to knock the _shem_ out of Jafar's hand, or to give into his insane plan to release all the power in the Chair and the Stone, turning him well-nigh completely invincible. And with no way to know what had happened to Henry. . . and if Hook had gambled her life away. . .

"You can't," she stammered at last, blindly bluffing. "Release the golem, that is. You needed the blood of one more person, and we rescued Elsa."

Jafar grinned broadly. _"That_ is what you are placing your surety on? As if you really think I would be so careless? The substance I administered to Elsa – which I am sure you have already discovered the side effects of – is draining her life force and magical energy into that vat of mud under St. Vitus Cathedral. When the process is complete, as it shall be shortly, she will be dead and the golem will only require the _shem_ to be brought fully to life. So you see. There is absolutely no way you can stop it. So sorry."

Emma opened and shut her mouth uselessly. She had never hated someone so much as she hated him just then, burning with the rage and futility of it. She was just about to rip off the gloves and go for his throat – whether with magic or her bare hands, it didn't matter – when at that moment, they both heard measured footsteps echoing down the transept, rounding the corner, and then stopping. As they absorbed the sight of the newcomer, Emma could not decide if she was saved or more utterly doomed than ever.

"You," Robert Gold said, whether to her or Jafar it was not clear. "Of course. No one else would be audacious enough to break into the Abbey itself. I seem to recall that the two of us have unfinished business. Don't we, dearie?"

Jafar did not look in the least discomfited. Instead, his smile widened. "Indeed we do, my friend. As I reminded you at the party, that bottle in your possession, the one you found lo those many years ago in the City of Brass? I would like it, please. And _don't_ make me ask again."

"And why on earth would I do that?"

"She just asked me the same question, incidentally. Because of this." Jafar held up the _shem._ "Oh yes, I got my hands on it. You really should have learned by now not to doubt me. I can level London if I please, or England, or more."

Gold bared his teeth. "Are you quite sure you wish to make that threat? Golems, after all, are not invincible."

"For my purposes, as good as." Jafar shrugged again. "You do not want to get into another duel, believe me. And you have nothing that I want, so please do not waste my time trying to make a bargain."

"What would make you think I bargain?" Gold took a menacing step. "Besides, you just told me that I _do_ have something you want. The bottle?"

"I am not trading the _shem_ for it, if that's what you meant. You are going to give it to me, for practical reasons well established."

Both magicians were all but ignoring her, and Emma began to wonder desperately if she could make a run for it. But at that moment, Jafar said pleasantly, "That's far enough, my dear," and clicked his fingers. Burning-hot iron chains sprang from nowhere, trussing Emma hand and foot, and she gasped in agony as they seared her skin. The more she struggled, the more they tightened.

"Ah," Gold remarked, inspecting her critically. "Somehow I am not surprised to find her part of this. While I would otherwise be in full favor of you doing away with her, I am afraid that I cannot presently permit it. She still owes me one pirate, alive or dead, and nobody breaks deals with me."

With that, he snapped his fingers as well, and Emma dropped like a stone as the chains vanished, barely managing to break her fall with her hands. Out of nowhere, and completely illogically, she found herself wishing desperately that Hook was here. It might be so that he had betrayed her and left her son to die, gambled her life away in Monte Carlo casino – but Jafar had openly admitted to lying and twisting the truth and saying whatever would frighten and fool his pawns into blundering into his traps on their own accord. And if the pirate _was_ here, Emma believed that he would not side with either Gold (God, no) or even Jafar, his nominal employer, but instead would fight tooth and claw to protect her. She didn't know why she was putting such stock in an impossible fantasy, when it made all the sense in the world to believe that an honorless, faithless outlaw was just the latest in the never-ending line of betrayals. But Hook – Killian Jones – was not that. She still did not know what he was, exactly, but he was not that. And if nothing else, she would not let Jafar defeat her by defeating herself, with blind panic, with mistrust, with her own weakness and demons.

At that, Emma felt a sudden, surging blaze of heat in her fingers, coiling out from her heart, down her shoulders and arms. In that, there was no more debate, no more paralyzing indecision. She didn't care what came of this. Only that this was not, after everything, the way she was going out.

In one smooth, lightning-quick motion, Emma rolled to her feet and ripped off the gloves, just as a tidal wave of white-hot magic burst from them like a thunderhead, sweeping in to unleash the heart of a storm. It rattled like drums and cannonfire off the sedate, soaring stones of Westminster, metamorphosing into dragons that spread their fiery wings and dove, embers fountaining up against the chancel screen and rebounding off the defensive nexus of spells surrounding the Chair and Stone. And with that, they burned madly to life.

Gold and Jafar, caught communally and completely off guard, yelled and dove in opposite directions as the Chair let off a volley of ruby-red beams like the one that had pulverized the marble knight earlier. They did not let up, and the sanctuary was quickly full of smoke, shaking with explosions as the firedrakes split and multiplied, soaring and darting – entirely outside Emma's control, she didn't think she could stop them now if she tried. Sparks cartwheeled on the floor, sending up towering pillars to match their stone counterpart, as Emma ran for it as she never had in her life.

And then, from nowhere, Jafar was in front of her, eyes so molten with fury that he barely looked human. He threw out a hand – hers flashed to meet it by pure instinct, and the air shuddered and caved in with a boom as the two blasts of magic hit each other and canceled each other out. Emma felt the impact all the way to her toes, sending her stumbling backward. Jafar was closing in on her like a lion about to take down a wounded gazelle, and she did not think she could repel a second attack of that magnitude – the first had been sheer dumb luck –

Jafar raised the hand with the _shem_ in it, lips peeled back over his teeth. Emma's eyes stayed locked on it, as she scrambled to summon up enough magic to even try to take a shot – but defending herself the first time had devoured it all, she couldn't –

The next instant, with a hiss and a zing, a green-fletched arrow split the murk and pierced the enchanted paper, ripping it from Jafar's grasp and sending it tumbling away. He whirled with a roar to go after it, but more arrows followed hard on its heels, and he was occupied in knocking them away. In the bare instant of time this bought her, Emma lunged.

She slid along the hallowed floorstones, blindly groping, until the tips of her fingers batted at the _shem,_ and she snatched it up. It had already mended itself, shimmering back together with no evidence it had ever been torn, and she stuffed it into her bodice. Then she blundered to her feet and ran. Behind her, she could hear Jafar swearing at the top of his lungs in three or four languages – and then another shadow careered up in front of her and turned into Gold, looking just as manic. "You _owe_ me – you signed that contract – break it now and you will never – "

Emma did not have breath to answer him or magic to fight him. He was between her and the exit, and she did not have time for any more of this bloody nonsense. Out of options, she resorted to the most simple and straightforward of all. She cocked a fist and punched him in the nose.

Gold had been prepared for magical resistance, if at all, and so he completely neglected to defend himself. Emma felt cartilage crack satisfyingly under her knuckles, and the President of the Royal Society staggered as she blasted past him, her seared eyes unable to make out where the door was. The firedrakes she had conjured were still circling above in wafts of flame, and as hard as she blinked, her vision remained an incomprehensible fury of spots.

Just then, someone grabbed her by the arm, and Emma screamed, flailed, and prepared to punch them as well. But a smoke-roughened voice bellowed, "Bloody hell, woman, it's me, it's _me!"_ and she stared up madly, for one impossible moment praying to see Killian. But it wasn't. It was a stained, filthy, and otherwise completely disreputable-looking Will Scarlet, dragging her so hard that her feet clattered like a broken puppet. She clutched back at him, the two of them attempting to run with no coordination whatsoever, until a second figure burst out of the smoke, whirling to fire his longbow once more into the melee. Tall, green-cloaked, sandy-haired, someone Emma felt certain she should recognize, but couldn't quite bring to mind –

"Oy, Robin, let's get the sodding hell out of here!" Will shouted, and the tall man nodded tersely and continued to provide covering fire as Will fumbled a Night Market key – or at least what looked as if it had once been one – out of his pocket and thrust it into the nearest door. He jiggled it and twisted hard, swearing, until it swung open, and he and Emma plunged.

The fall was significant, ten or twelve feet, and dark, wet ground smashed up to take them broadside. Emma lay uselessly wheezing, until Will seized her by the ankles and pulled her out of the way just as Robin jumped down after them. The door banged shut above, and all she could hear was their frantic, ragged gasping.

"Bloody _hell,_ " Will croaked, a sentiment with which everyone present heartily agreed. "I musta lost twenty years off my life, the last few days."

Emma coughed, sat up slowly, and had to put her head between her knees as it reeled. "Th-thanks. But how the – _how the – "_

"Long story," Will panted. "Trust me. D'ya have the thingamabob?"

Emma patted herself down, fumbled at her torn dress, and felt a horrifying wave of nausea sweep over her as she realized that she had dropped the _shem_ in the chaos of their escape. "Oh God. Oh, God. It's still back there."

"What?" Robin interrupted. "What thing?"

"Ah – so it may be that in a previous escapade in Prague, we retrieved a magical paper that is bad bloody news for everyone. You ever heard of a golem, mate?"

"Tell me you're joking, Scarlet."

"Wish I was. And now – the hell was that bloody bastard doin' in Westminster, anyway? Wanted to practice his singing? Somehow I don't think it was to repent of all his terrible deeds and become a monk."

"No." Emma pushed herself to her feet, still gagging on the taste of tunnel dirt. "Remember how we worked out that he tricked us into going into the vaults of St. Vitus so I would break the magical wards? So now he has free access to all the powerful and dangerous things hidden down there? So far as he can be believed, that was just a practice run for this. He wanted me to undo the protective spells on the Chair of St. Edward and the Stone of Scone, so he could have access to all their stored magic – and I'm guessing, crown himself ruler of the British Empire."

There was a heavy, fraught silence. Then Will said, "Bloody hell. With that, and a golem, _and_ whatever he wanted from Gold. . . he'd be unstoppable."

"Yes." Emma swallowed something bad-tasting. "Don't forget that knife he had in Monaco – he called it the Key of Solomon _arthame_ , I think he's stealing all the objects of massive power he can get his hands on. And he's very close to having all of them."

"Not yet," Will declared, with a rousing if feeble show of confidence. "He don't have you."

Emma laughed bitterly. "And how long do you think I can stay away from him?"

"Er. . ." Will glanced at Robin. "Any ideas, mate?"

The other man did not answer, regarding Will narrowly. Then he said, "What aren't you telling me, Scarlet?"

Will opened his mouth, apparently thought about saying something, but after a long moment, looking frustrated, didn't. "I can't, all right?"

"Why not? Who are you working for?"

"I – look, it's complicated, all right? I'm tryin' to help you!"

"Oh, aye." Robin's skepticism fairly reverberated off the walls. "Since that's always been the case before." Then, recollecting himself, he glanced at Emma. "Pray forgive my terrible manners, my lady. I am Robin of Locksley, leader of the Merry Men, and you would be, unless I am much mistaken, the Black Swan."

"Ah – yes." Somewhat discomfited, Emma allowed him to impress a brief, correct kiss on the back of her hand. "Thank you for coming after me. How did you know where I was?"

Robin looked pointedly at Will, who gazed at the ceiling, scratching behind his ear in a gesture that unaccountably reminded her of Killian. "Actually, it was a bit of a. . . what d'ya call it. . . coincidence. I told Robin he'd have a crack at Gold, and he decided to take me along to see if I'd put me money where my mouth was. Lucky break we ran into you, eh?"

"Perhaps," Emma said guardedly. "How did you know that Gold would be at Westminster, though?"

"I. . . ah. . . well, I'm a smart bloke, aren't I?"

Robin raised one eyebrow. "As I find it dishonorable to fight a defenseless man, I will refrain from comment on that. You're hiding something, Scarlet, and before we go back to the camp, you are going to tell us what."

Will opened his mouth, but once again, nothing came out, and Robin snorted disapprovingly. "Still can't just be honest. You're wanted by all of London, and I'm certainly not going to do the Royal Society's dirty work for them, but I cannot permit you to – "

"The _shem!"_ Will burst out suddenly, startling both of them. "We can't just leave it there for either Gold or Jafar to get their grubby mitts on. And I. . . for your safety. . . I. . . I have to go back and retrieve it."

"What?" Robin and Emma said in unison.

Will gave them a pleading look. "I swear. I'm really tryin' to help."

"If you go back there. . ." Emma hesitated. "You could never come out."

"Maybe so, but maybe not. I'm a thief, after all. Wiggled meself out of tighter corners than this one, and you know I'm right. If they do get it, then all the holes we can hide down aren't goin' to help us. So." Will folded his arms. "This way I don't come back to the camp neither. Better for all of us that way. Especially you, Locksley, since you've made it plain you can't wait to be shot of me."

Robin looked at him wearily. "You could just come clean, rather than this. . .Will, she's right, you're going to kill yourself."

"Oy, thanks for the confidence vote. And if I could do this another way, I would, but I can't. And the more time we waste here yappin', the longer my odds get, so I should step on it. If I see ya, I'll see ya. Otherwise. . ." Will paused, then glanced at Emma. "Tell Elsa that I. . . I liked her, all right? And don't let the bastards win, because that would be annoying. So long, Robin. Don't cry too hard if I snuff it. You'll meet another nice thief someday."

With that, shoulders tense as if he was trying very hard to keep himself together, Will turned around and strode back the way they had come, faint curses echoing from the darkness as he climbed up toward the door. Robin and Emma remained where they were, mildly stunned, until the sounds had faded, and then he turned abruptly to her. "Do you have _any_ idea what that was all about?"

"No," Emma admitted. But something about Will's bizarre behavior wasn't adding up. For all that he _was_ a thief, she hadn't taken him for a liar, and for him to point-blank refuse Robin the truth was even stranger. He certainly was not working for the Royal Society, who wanted him as dead as possible as fast as possible – or at least, not by his own volition. And while he was of course correct that the _shem_ could not be permitted to fall into either Gold or Jafar's clutches, she wondered if he would have volunteered so promptly for an apparent suicide mission if he wasn't already convinced that he was a dead man. "I. . . I think there's something wrong with him."

"I wouldn't doubt it," Robin said cynically.

"No, that's not what I meant. I think when he said he couldn't tell you, he was being honest. There's something stopping him, some kind of. . . I don't know, enchantment or bewitchment or something. The last time I saw him was in Monaco, where Jafar and Gold were dueling in Gold's mansion after Jafar crashed the party. Gold must have brought him back here, and so. . ." Emma could see a plan, just as desperate and improbable as Will's, but currently their only hope, forming in front of her. "Do you know where the Royal Society would keep an impounded airship?"

Robin blinked. "Likely in Wapping, near Execution Dock – that's what they've done with other pirate vessels they've captured, the _Jolly Roger_ would be no different." Seeing Emma's expression of surprise, he added, "I am well aware that Will had joined Captain Hook's crew – it was all over the papers after he stole the compass from the Exhibition. But my lady, what can you possibly be – "

"Look. Will's right. If we go back down to whatever's left of the Night Market and hide, it'll just make our death slower. And you said you wanted to fight Gold."

"I do." Robin's jaw set hard. "More than anything."

"Well then." Emma turned on the charm, flashed her most winning smile, and put a hand on her hip. "You have the Merry Men. I can't do this alone. And we're not going to stay pinned down and hidden. It's time we had a few surprises of our own up our sleeve. So. Help me steal the _Jolly Roger_ back."


	19. Chapter 19

Killian's boots slipped and skidded on the wet grass as he ran, arms pumping, head down. The waning moon was drowned in storm clouds, and he could feel the cold condensation in the air, beading on his face and running down his cheeks like tears, but he was not crying. Just grim, dead-set, bloodstained, sword swinging at his hip and hook dripping crimson – but then, not even he could fight his way through a dozen men and emerge _completely_ unscathed. Still devilishly handsome, likely, though there was not a looking glass presently at hand to ascertain it, and he had far more pressing business. After carving through Iago and his rent-a-thugs, he had sprinted upstairs to the attic, but found no sign of Henry. There was no way to tell if the boy had gotten away, to safety or otherwise, and so Killian had started to scour the estate from top to bottom. But Applewood Hall was devoid of all life, the surviving thugs and Iago having elected to cut their losses and retreat to fetch more backup, and Killian knew that he had only a very short amount of time before they returned with the big guns. He had to find Henry and get out of here before then, or they were both done for.

He abruptly reached the verge where the grassy lawn dipped down into a steep dell, lined with bare, forbidding yew and hawthorn trees hundreds of years old, and had to windmill his arms to keep from plunging over. "Henry," he hissed, as loud as he dared. "Bloody hell, lad, where are you?"

No answer. No hint of anything. But then across the way, Killian caught sight of a low, dark stone door set into the hill. All at once, he remembered Henry's insistent claim about Lady Regina's vault, and the enchanted people supposedly asleep in it – could it be that in his panic, the boy had run here instead, reckoning (likely very correctly) that nobody would be brave enough to follow him? Down under. . . _under. . ._ where?

The last thing Killian himself wanted to do was enter that place. His mother having been born a Traveller, with their rumored fae blood, and hearing all the legends about the haunts of the Fair Folk. . . go down there, and it was no safe wager he'd ever come out. There was strong dark magic in there, of that much he could be certain, and a determination to guard its secrets at any price. But if Henry had blundered in unknowing. . . bloody hell, to come this far and turn back now, and tell Swan that her son was dead because he was too pissing craven to follow where an eleven-year-old boy had led. . .

Adding a few more choice epithets under his breath, Killian tightened his swordbelt, wiped his bloody hook clean on a clump of grass, and set off on quick-march toward the vault, which loomed up unwelcomingly in front of him. He checked the door for signs of forced entry, and saw faint black scrapes on the stone. The lock itself was more of a difficulty, but he was Captain thrice-damned Hook, and refused to be defeated by any provincial mechanism. Finally, hearing the tumblers click and groan, he shoved it open and looked for a rock to prop it with; the risk of being caught down here by an apoplectic Regina was still better than accidentally trapping himself inside for good. All he could see was a narrow, dark staircase, barely wide enough for one man, leading precipitately into the depths of the earth.

Out of old reflex, Killian crossed himself. _"Beannaithe Naomh_ _Miche_ _á_ _l, a chosaint chugainn ó deamhain,"_ he muttered, the only amount of his own magic he could summon to ward off whatever lay below. He put a boot cautiously on the top step; a plume of dust blew off. He bent over, peering at it, but it was too dark to tell if others, child-sized perhaps, had fled here recently. _"Henry?"_ It echoed, sepulchral, into the abyss. _Enry. . .enry. . . nry. . ._

Swallowing his unease, Killian began to descend. Writhing roots clawed out at him, like skeletal fingers reaching for his life, his light, his warmth, and he hacked them away with his hook, fighting the impulse to tear them all out and run. This was no place for an airship captain, master of the skies, whose world was bracketed only by the wide horizon. Something felt _alive_ down here, sentient, breathing in soft sighs, cold whispers at the back of his neck. The walls were closing in, and he could feel sweat break out on his forehead. He hadn't been entirely at ease with the crypts of St. Vitus, though he'd managed well enough, but this. . . this was different.

At last, the steep, twisting stairs leveled out into a comparatively flat underground corridor. Groping along by touch, stumbling over every godforsaken pebble, Killian blinked and blinked to clear the dancing blue spots from his eyes, until he realized that they were some sort of eerie will-o'the-wisp globes, hovering near the ceiling to mark the way. At once he crouched down, inspecting the dirt, and this time could see footprints – new enough that they broken earth showed dark against the smoother, older hardpack. _Someone_ had been down here, at least, and Killian sped up. "Henry!"

As the blue light grew brighter, he stepped out into an expansive underground chamber, lichen clambering up the squat, heavy Norman Romanesque pillars that hoisted it on their shoulders. It did indeed resemble a private mausoleum for the dearly departed of the Mills family, but the detail that struck him as odd was the glass coffins, neatly laid out in rows and rows that stretched away into the gloom. Lady Regina had not struck him in the least as the sentimental type, sneaking down here to weep over dead relations painstakingly preserved as they had been in life, and something about these people was even stranger.

Moving closer to one, Killian peered through the thick, rippled surface at its occupant: a man not much older than himself, wearing a long red cape as if he had been in the midst of performing some heroic deed when he was apprehended and inserted into his confinement. Driven by an abrupt impulse, Killian rapped his knuckles on the lid, half expecting it to wake the man up, but of course, it didn't. He looked vaguely familiar, but Killian couldn't immediately place him. Something about the sandy-blonde hair and the structure of the face, the closed eyes, that almost reminded him of –

Bloody hell. What the – ? He'd glanced to the coffin placed directly opposite, like some sort of shadow not permitted to join its body, and seen a woman inside who, but for her black hair, could have been Swan's twin sister. Indeed, if one matched the woman's features with the man's coloring, one would in fact have produced an individual looking too much like his erstwhile bounty-hunting acquaintance to pass for any sort of freakish coincidence. _Her parents?_ The improbable thought suggested itself before he could stop it, and once arrived, could not readily be dislodged. Had Henry known exactly what he was on about after all? But then. . . Swan's son. . . it would be no chance that Lady Regina wanted to keep him close, would it? Why would she have wanted to curse an entire family – and others too, to judge by the number of coffins? That story she had fed him about only being a former student of Robert Gold's, rejected from all the higher institutions of magic due to her sex. . . well, that part was likely true enough. But casting and maintaining an enchantment of this magnitude would require a practitioner of singularly rare and dangerous skill, and considering that it was one with a murderous vendetta against Emma Swan and everyone and everything she was. . .

It was cold in the vault as it was, but Killian felt still colder. Only belatedly did it occur to him that his reaction should have been to see about recruiting Lady Regina to assist him in vengeance against their common nemesis, as they had discussed on his last visit, but his first and only thought had been for Emma's safety. And for a man as painfully self-aware as he was, constantly bedeviled by the terrible serpent's apple of knowledge, he was forced to reckon with it. As much as he tried to tell himself that it was only for guilt at Bae's memory, he knew it was not so. Killian had not survived a decade and a half as a pirate by performing altruistic deeds in the name of dead men. Besides, this entire mess, Henry's kidnapping, was his fault to begin with.

He stood a moment longer, irresolute. Then he strode to the wall, removed an implement of suitable weight and sharpness, and swung it with all his strength into the side of the man's coffin.

A titanic crash echoed through the dank subterranean chamber, and Killian's heart caught in his throat as an intricate web of cracks flowered and began to spread. But just as he was madly certain that this was actually going to work, the glass hissed and melted back together, glazing over still thicker and glowing with a threatening red radiance. The man – _Swan's father?_ He could not think of it otherwise – suddenly jerked, as if his eternal sleep had been fouled with terrible nightmares, and his limbs were pinned tightly to his sides as the coffin shrank considerably. Thus it remained, burning that sinister crimson, as Killian stared back at it. So, then. Apparently not.

"Sorry, mate," he mumbled, replacing the implement hastily and deciding that it might be exceedingly beneficial to get out of here before he set off any more magical booby traps. He shot one more long look over the rest of the coffins – was it just his guilty conscience, or were they also heating and contracting, caught in the spreading circles of whatever defensive spell had repelled his foolish effort to free them? At any rate, regrets had to be notified. Henry was still out there, and heaven only knew what was down here.

Not daring to look back, more than half convinced that someone or something was following him, Killian galloped up the stairs, banging his head a good half-dozen times on the low stone and swearing, and finally scrambled out and somersaulted down the steep, grassy bank. He sucked in deep gulps of chilly night air, delightfully fresh after the cloistered must of the crypt, rolled to his feet, and prepared to make a break for it. Hopefully his ill-advised sojourn underground had not cost him the chance to –

" _HAH!"_

Oh, bugger.

Killian swerved madly one way and then the other, anything to escape the closing trap, but no luck. Something heavy punched him in the small of the back, sending him sprawling, and thick hemp ropes raveled around him from every side, trussing him like an animal in a net. Twisted and squashed with horrendous indignity, hook snagged and with no chance of reaching his sword with his good hand, he was reduced to bestowing his captors with the iciest look imaginable as they gathered around, leering and jeering. "Oy, Iago! We've got 'im!"

"I'm shocked you chumps didn't cock it up," Jafar's henchman announced, arriving a moment later to inspect the prize for himself. "Oh yeah, pirate. You thought you were being funny with that little episode earlier, didn't you? Hey, I got a joke for you. Knock knock, who's there? It's my buddy, You're, and his good friend, Fucked. Jafar is going to make you into something pretty to hang on the wall. Boohoo. I'm crying, I'm crying. No, wait. I'm not."

Killian continued to stare at him with the utmost quantity of haughty, frigid disdain, conveying that he could not possibly have held less regard for Iago if he had been a stain of shit on the sole of his boot. "Are you going to stop talking before I freeze to death? That being the only danger I am currently in, seeing as your minions couldn't find their own arses with both hands, much less a way to actually hurt me."

One of the nearby thugs reached for his posterior with a confused expression, and was promptly whacked by Iago. Then they grabbed the ropes of the net, hauled Killian into the air like a lot of bloody savages preparing to roast him over a fire and eat him, and removed him at speed across the lawn to a waiting airship, hovering low and huffing steam. Something cranked open, and Killian found himself thrown bodily into the cargo hold among a stack of heavy crates. He twisted his head, trying to see what they were, but his hopes were not high – surely Jafar would not entrust anything too vital to these chuckleheads. The markings on the sides were scuffed and faded, and likely they had been disguised as innocuous goods anyway. And caught like a fish in a net, he could not do much more than flop ineffectually. _Save your strength, Jones. You're going to need it._

Though it went against every instinct in his body, Killian forced himself to relax. The hold hatch slammed, and he would have no longer been able to see his hand before his face, even if he was holding it up. There were distant thumps and clanks, and then he felt them lift off. If there was any way to hijack as he and Emma had done with Walsh's balloon. . . but his current position was a steep disadvantage from which to mount an escape attempt. Better to wait out the journey to their destination – with all but complete certainty, London – and then consider his options.

The airship bumped and jolted as it climbed, and he felt each one keenly. A sharp corner from one of the crates was digging a hole into his back, and he was so desperately bloody thirsty that he thought he was about to parch into dust and blow away. Even these bodily discomforts, however, were nothing compared to the maelstrom in his head – his crushing guilt at having failed to save Henry, and his shock at finding that the lad's tales were all true, that his and Emma's family were all trapped and enchanted in that strange fey place. Indeed, as they rattled and wheezed into the skies, Killian clung to his only, raw consolation that Emma herself was safe. He had never been able to do a thing to compromise it. Not from the moment he met her. And certainly not in the moment when that sixth and final spin of the roulette wheel in the Monte Carlo casino had landed, as he had known somehow it would, on bloody, damning, death-sentence red. When Jafar had smiled broadly and began to speak, to say that Miss Swan's life was sadly forfeit, and without even thinking about it, Killian had blurted out, "No. Mine. Take mine instead."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Take mine instead." He gazed into the sorcerer's serpent eyes unblinkingly. "You cheated. I saw you move your hand as the ball fell. It's no honest wager. It was meant to fall black, and that means I win. And as my prize, I name my own life. Not hers."

"That is a remarkably odd use of a reprieve, Captain. Not a full pardon from the British Empire, reparations for your brother's death? Not riches and glory? Not Robert Gold's head on a platter?" Jafar had regarded him musingly. "Besides, what is gambling but organized and strategic cheating? Don't be a fool. Admit that the wager was wrong, that Miss Swan is sentenced to death, and you can have any of it you like. I am doing you a great favor, and I advise you not to examine it too closely in the teeth."

"No." Killian had almost laughed, then, at the clarity of it. "My life. Not hers. When this is done, you can kill me in whatever gruesome fashion your remarkably keen and inventive mind can dream up. Do whatever experiments you please; I know you have some sort of way to make my corpse mimic that of a savant's. That is how you have studied them before. That's what you've done with the bodies of everyone you murdered to create the golem. You don't _really_ need Emma. You can have me instead."

"What a selfless offer in the name of science, my dear man." Jafar smiled. "Very well, I accept. When this is all finished, I shall use you to complete my investigation into the nature of magic. But I did so desire a _real_ savant, and not a clumsy, artificial replacement. Is there anything you can offer me to compensate for this disappointment?"

"Aye. That vacation to Yorkshire you mentioned earlier? You'll want to direct yourself to the attention of a Lady Regina Mills, mistress of Applewood Hall. You and she will have much in common."

Much in common.

_Much in common._

The phrase rang in Killian's head like an out-of-tune bell. _My fault._ He had told Jafar about this place. Had thought that Jafar and Regina would make common cause in their hatred of Gold, that hurting Henry would be entirely counterproductive if Jafar required his mother's cooperation. Had been trying to have it both ways, to save Emma's life and still accomplish his vengeance. . . gone back to the _Jolly Roger_ already a dead man, and kissed her to see if the price had been worth it. And _Christ._ It was. It was.

That was why he had so swiftly decided to go to Yorkshire via the Traveller network, when they heard Henry was in danger. Because he could not, in his blackened and shattered honor, do any differently. He was the one who had led the wolves there. Emma would never forgive him, but he was going to die long before he ever saw her again. His life had bought hers, but at an impossible, bloodstained price. _I won the wager, and lost all else._

Still. He could not, even now, regret it. He had saved her, in the only way a selfish, vengeful madman could. She would have escaped. She was like that, Swan. God, what a woman. He tried to conjure her in the darkness, her taste and touch and smell. He would die with the ghost of her on his lips. That love poem by Catullus floated to mind. _Then give me a thousand kisses, and a hundred more. Then another thousand, and a second hundred. Then yet another thousand, and a hundred. Then, when we have counted up many thousands, let us shake the abacus,_ _so that no one may know the number._

One never-ending night. A brief light that could burn but once. _Da mi basia mille._

At the end, then, that was the only thing he had won, or the greatest thing he had lost. Best to take pride. Emma was safe.

Emma was safe.

Emma was safe, and he was damned.

* * *

Swearing under her breath, Emma Swan peered around the frosted piling, struggling to make out anything in the hoary, heavy fog that lay over Execution Dock, transforming the world into distant ghosts. The surface of the river had turned to armor-plates of ice, and jagged sheaves of crystalline blades hung from the mooring lines that held the impounded airships. There were three or four of them, and Emma squinted, trying to work out which one was the _Jolly Roger._ One had Russian markings, another looked barely able to fly, and then the _Roger_ could be either one of the final two. It was crucial that they get it right on the first try; they weren't likely to have time for a second one. But at least a hopeful side effect of this unnatural winter was that the guards would be more interested in huddling around braziers or charcoal burners, rather than keeping an eye on the ships. The element of surprise wasn't much, but it was all they had.

Coast was clear. Emma beckoned, and she and Robin darted from one piling to the next, keeping out of the line of sight from the brick customs-houses built along the wharf. It occurred to her to wonder just how, even assuming they could successfully commandeer the ship, they would get it to launch. Airships were customarily kept drained of gas at port to avoid accidents and explosions, and she doubted there would be a convenient canister lying around, especially seeing as all these vessels belonged to captured criminals. When they were hanged, their ship would likewise be turned to scrap. A powerful and final display of the Empire's might, and the fate that awaited those who crossed it.

Emma determinedly pushed that thought out of her mind. The farther of the two was the _Roger,_ she was almost certain of it, and pointed. Robin nodded. Picking out cover here and there, they edged across the docks – the fog was also an unexpected blessing in this department – until the hull of the pirate ship loomed directly above them. It was shackled both bow and stern, heavy chains paying out of massive bollards. Robin raised an eyebrow at her, as if inquiring what she proposed to do about those, and she shook her head tensely, motioning him around to keep watch. Then she took a running start, threw herself into a hard leap, and caught hold of the chain, wrapping arms and legs around it and shimmying up.

Snowflakes sifted into her face, and the iron was bitterly cold, especially through the ragged remnants of the dress she had changed into at Applewood Hall – a plain brown wool, replacing the tattered, sooty Black Swan gown she had worn at Gold's masquerade ball. After its subsequent adventure to Norway and the fight in Westminster, it was likewise looking extremely worn, and it was a harder climb than Emma thought. By the time she finally clawed her way over the side and somersaulted onto the _Roger's_ icy, deserted deck, she had torn her hands to raw, bloody shreds and was shivering so hard that she kept biting her tongue. But she recollected herself and stood up unsteadily, surveying the prospects of getting this thing out here.

She stole across the boards and up the stairs to the wheelhouse. It was locked, the lodestone dark, and the zeppelin was flat and empty, motionless as the Union Jack on a still day. Emma calculated quickly, shooting a glance over the railing to see Robin dutifully manning the lookout twenty feet below, and found where the chains had been secured both front and aft. She flexed her abused fingers, trying to get the blood flowing, and concentrated intently. When a golden spark buzzed into the air like a fat, lazy bumblebee, she touched it to the frozen iron and held her breath.

A warm, burnished glow started up and began to blossom at once, casting an almost sun-like radiance through the fog, and Emma closed her eyes, tongue between her teeth, doing her best to feed it. They had to get the ship, they had to rescue Will and Elsa and stop Jafar from using the _shem,_ and find her son. And Killian. She had chosen to believe that Jafar was lying when he said the pirate had callously and self-servingly abandoned her, and that thought of him in Westminster had made her magic flare powerfully. So, even though she loathed the risk of it, she allowed herself to take root in it, to grow, inhaling it, branching like a tree. Stronger and stronger. Until she heard a crack, her eyes flashed open, and she saw the broken chain slithering off the deck like a mighty serpent, hanging in midair – and then, plummeting.

"ROBIN!" The shout burst out of her lungs before she could stop it, seeing the leader of the Merry Men still standing below with no apparent idea that he was about to be crushed. He looked up in shock, then dived as the chain crashed with an almighty uproar, and with that, both of them knew any further hope of secrecy was out the window. Robin whirled, strung his longbow, and fired at somebody charging out of the fog, and Emma sprinted frantically aft, fingers burning so hot she almost cried out, and disposed of the rear chain within a few seconds. Freed, the airship rocked and tilted precipitously, and she raised her hands, sending a stream of golden aether into the zeppelin. It hissed and burbled, but stayed aloft at least, and she teetered back to the wheelhouse, activated the lodestone, and cranked the wheel until it groaned free.

All at once, the _Roger_ lunged forward like a runaway elephant, and Emma had to use all her strength hauling it back under control; the wheel was not the featherweight that Killian made it look. And if she hadn't had prior experience flying Walsh's balloon to Norway, she might not have known what she was doing at all, and experienced an odd, demented moment of gratitude for it. She was so wrapped up in not driving them straight into the ground that it did not occur to her until a moment later to wonder how Robin was going to get aboard, but the rope ladder had swung free from the side in the course of their acrobatics, and it dipped and swung as the thief leapt onto it. _"Hold on!"_ she yelled, and gunned it.

As if it had been waiting too long and too eagerly to fly, the pirate ship responded at once, as she banked it into a tight arc and gained altitude fast, Robin still clinging to the ladder and somehow managing to get off a few arrows to discourage the pursuit on the ground. They didn't have much of a head start, but the Met would need to fire up a few airships and then find them in the fog, which would take time, and Emma was fairly sure this thing had a cloaking spell. She leveled out, still wrestling the helm, and held a steady course long enough for Robin's white-knuckled hands to appear on the railing and for him to haul himself aboard. "Good flying, my lady," he panted. "Truly impressive."

"Good shooting." She tried to reckon their position by the naked eye, but London was a sea of mist to every side, with telltale landmarks almost completely obscured. The cold wind scraped her eyes and cheeks raw, and the snowfall was starting to pick up speed again. She couldn't keep them airborne by sheer force of magic forever, or even much longer, and Robin was already working the bellows, trying to get gas pumped into the dirigible. "Westminster!" she yelled at him. "Which way is Westminster? Can you tell?"

Robin's head spun, and he gaped for a moment before pointing wildly in the approximate direction they were making; at that, Emma could just see the tip of Big Ben's clock tower peeking through the fog. She grabbed hold of the wheel again, as Robin's efforts succeeded in getting the zeppelin at least partially inflated. _Hopefully_ they didn't tear themselves open on some church steeple, and by collective main force, they steered the pirate ship through the smoky silver sky, above a world of ice and snow. _Elsa._ She had to be around here somewhere, if Will was; the question about how they had escaped from Monaco was another one that would have to wait for an answer, but no one else was likely to have triggered this. One thing at a time. As close as they could make it. First to Westminster, go in guns blazing if need be, but that was an outcome which was only certain to end in their communal gory deaths. She knew that the ship ran heavily armed, but a crew of only two was not going to be able to load and fire the cannons and the long nines and the bow chasers and whatever the hell else was aboard. Assuming that any were at all. The Royal Society had probably already been through and removed anything that looked like contraband, money, or weapons, which would constitute most of the _Roger's_ cargo and fittings. So. . . what? Crash the ship into the abbey, and think that would actually be enough to defeat a sorcerer of Jafar's magnitude?

Emma was seriously wondering if this was going to be a suicide mission, when the sky was darkened sharply from above like the shadow of a diving hawk. She had just enough time to twist her head up and scream a warning, before the second airship barreled out of the clouds at full ramming speed. She threw the _Roger_ into a dive that just barely avoided them being broadsided, the enemy vessel scraping against their outriggers with a cascade of shrieking sparks and trying to convert its momentum into a turn, but it was still going too fast and vanished back into the clouds before it could heel around. "Hey!" she yelled frantically. "Shoot it! _Shoot it!"_

Robin braced himself against the forecastle and took aim, launching a volley of arrows at the attacking airship as it came around for another pass – but they fell short or were invisibly repelled, never coming close to puncturing the zeppelin. The enemy ship kept trying to cut them off or knock them out of the air, jostling up alongside them, and as Emma clung to the wheel, she saw Westminster Abbey cartwheel madly past, fifty feet below. Their attackers clearly did not want them to get there, and yet it was just as clearly not a Navy airship in Nelson's chequey, but black and unmarked. Not one of Gold's, then. And the other powerful personage of note who had recently been in the Abbey was. . .

It was just a hunch, a mad hunch, but Emma had generally survived by following her hunches, and there was no time to second-guess this one. She threw the wheel hard starboard, locking the bows of the _Roger_ and its enemy together, and used all the momentum of the fizzling-out magic and the zeppelin gas alike to drive them down toward the twin Gothic towers of the Abbey roof. Robin hung on for dear life as timbers splintered and ropes flew like writhing snakes, but Emma didn't stop until she had smashed the hull of the other ship onto the stone spires. It rolled the zeppelin over broadside, exposing it, and Robin strung three arrows to his bow, notched, drew, and fired. They pierced the silk bag just behind the nose cone, and gas hissed and sparked as it leaked, crippling the enemy vessel. The underside had been breached, the hold starting to spill out crates and boxes and a thick hemp net, as if they had decided to pop by the North Sea for a spot of fishing before returning here to enact their nefarious –

Wait. _Wait._ For a moment, she was sure her eyes were deceiving her, and in the next, she had never been more sure. Seen the flash of a silver hook clawing desperately for purchase as it fell, and her heart stopped. The net crashed into the steeple, then slid down it and caught on a jutting stone outcrop, dangling a hundred feet above the London street. She threw out her hands by instinct, desperately struggling for the magic, but all she produced was a few burned-smelling sparks. She had channeled it so easily and boundlessly when they were liberating the _Roger_ from Execution Dock, but seeing that net hanging there, so vulnerable, perched on the edge of the abyss, her mind went blank with terror. She couldn't. She couldn't.

Robin, seeing her paralysis, broke loose and scrambled across the tilted deck to the railing. He unslung a grappling hook, fastened it to the capstan, and lowered the line down. It dangled above the net, but couldn't quite snag it, and Emma struggled to aim it. The smell of gas was thick and choking in her nose; the enemy airship was about to blow up, they needed to get out, they needed to get free. But she wasn't leaving without him.

On their next try, the grappling hook seized hold of the net, and Robin began to haul with all his might. Emma clambered madly back to the wheel, steering the _Roger_ off the roof, as the net swung free. They barely had any thrust; she was going to be lucky to glide them to the ground. But Robin was still pulling, and then the top of the net appeared over the railing, about to tumble onto the deck – Killian was there, they'd got him, he was safe –

And then, with an enormous white flash and thunderous explosion, the enemy airship disintegrated, hailing debris everywhere. Emma felt flying splinters scar her face, threw up an arm just in time, as she managed to guide the pirate ship into a more or less controlled dive. They slid and spun toward the earth, then fell like a stone the last ten or twenty feet and landed on their side, carving a huge divot from the grassy sward. Burning embers mingled with the snow, hissing and seething around them, as Emma could hear the distant roar of the airship burning on the Abbey roof. But all her attention was fixed on one thing.

"Hook. . ." She scrambled across the sooty, snowy ground toward where the net had fallen. "Hook. . . Killian!" Her fingers shook as she tore at the heavy hemp, grabbed something sharp from the rubble, and sawed it open. The pirate tumbled out, unconscious, as she caught him, hands petting and nursing his head, trying to shake him awake. "Killian, come back to me! Come back to me!"

His head flopped. She crouched over him, still cradling his face between her hands. Kept shaking him, he wasn't waking, he _wasn't_ – and then, out of ideas, she pushed his lips apart with her thumbs, pressed her mouth to his, and breathed into him.

Something shuddered around them, strong enough to shake even the wreckage and the rain of ash, the twisted jags of wood and the burning sky. His eyes fluttered, then opened, staring into hers with utter, blank shock, before recognition and panic flared. "Swan," he groaned. "What have you done? What have you _done?"_

Emma couldn't answer, just kept both fists clenched onto the lapels of his jacket. His own hand raised as if to grasp her wrist, and they remained locked like that for a very long moment, before she shook her head, trying to make herself return to the full force of their reality – they were sitting in the remains of the _Roger_ on the lawn of Westminster Abbey, all of them now sentenced to death, nowhere to run. Together at the end of all things. She kept her forehead close to his, almost touching, not quite. "Henry?" she whispered.

"He. . ." Killian arched in a spasm of agony. "I. . . love, it's. . . my. . . fault. I led them there. Bartered the information to Jafar when I. . ."

"When you?" He was slipping away, she was losing him. "Killian, look at me, when you what?"

"Monte Carlo. . ." His chest heaved, struggling for breath. "So sorry, love. . . so. . . sorry. . ."

"No, no. Stay with me, stay with me." She cupped his face. "Jafar had that medallion, remember? The enchanted medallion that was tracking you and recording everything. He would have known, he would always have known. Just. . . did Henry. . .?"

"He got away. . . I don't know where. . .they don't have him, though. . . almost sure. . ."

"We'll find him, all right? We'll find him." Emma barely knew what she was saying, or believed it herself, just wanted to comfort him somehow. "Shh. Save your strength."

Killian groaned, as if he could not see what on earth the point of this would be. But at that moment, Emma was distracted by the sound of crunching footsteps, and looked up to see Robin returning. Preoccupied with Killian, she hadn't even seen him go, but here he was, with the limp body of Will Scarlet in his arms. She opened and shut her mouth, as the leader of the Merry Men grimly set the young thief beside the captain. Finally she managed, "Is he. . . is he. . .?"

"I don't know." Robin rocked back on his heels. "The place was empty, scorched to bits. But I can tell you one thing, and it's not what anyone wants to hear."

"Yes?"

"Jafar has the _shem,_ " Robin said quietly. "And now, beyond any doubt, he is going to use it."


	20. Chapter 20

"So," Emma said, cutting to the heart of the matter with commendably grim economy of purpose. "What the hell do we do now?"

They had beaten a frantic, ragtag retreat from the smashed wreckage of the _Roger_ and the mounting inferno around Westminster – Robin carrying Will and her left to deal with Killian, put in mind of their escape from Gold's mansion with him similarly non compos mentis, wondering angrily why on earth the damn pirate couldn't just stop putting himself in these idiotic situations and requiring her to save his arse. Bloody damsel-in-distress with a strong streak of drama queen, that was Killian "oh I must kill the most powerful magician on the face of the earth while looking broodingly handsome in eyeliner" Jones. _Careless. Callous. Reckless. Selfish. Vengeful._ She had to remind herself of all these qualities, picking them over and over like a dragon in its hoard counting up every coin, otherwise she would remember how it felt in that moment when she thought she really had lost him, and in no way, in no shape or form, was she possibly prepared to do that.

The cause of all this trouble had been, along with Will, stowed on a makeshift pile of canvas sacking and old blankets, the closest thing they could come to an infirmary bed. The vast subterranean tunnel network where the refugees of the Night Market had quite literally gone underground, apparently led by Robin, was unnerving Emma more than she cared to admit, even though she had spent time in the dark and deep places under London before. She, the captain of the Merry Men, and Princess Anna were huddled together by the light of a lone candle, Elsa having also been brought over to join the men, and trying to work out some, any plan of action. But there were no good choices, only bad ones and worse.

"Well," Robin said, scratching his sandy stubble. "The one thing we know for sure is that Jafar has the _shem,_ and will likely be halfway to Prague by now, intending to raise the golem. Which if he does, needless to say, will result in the destruction of London, if not all of England."

Emma rubbed her temples. "Unless I consented to unlock the magical wards around the Stone of Scone and the Chair of St. Edward, so he could take over and rule as supreme emperor of the world – or at least Britain. He also said, during our confrontation in Westminster, that the poison he gave to Elsa was draining her life and magic into the golem, and there was no way we could stop it. Not to mention, of course, there is still the _small_ fact that my son is missing." Her stomach clenched. "And we have no idea where."

"If Jafar had him, we would know it," Robin said wearily. "He would already be here flaunting him in our faces, trying to use him for leverage. I know it is cold consolation, my lady. . . if it was _my_ son, I too would be turning over every stone in search of him. But did you get the opportunity to warn anyone what was happening, before Jafar kidnapped you?"

"Sort of. Kristoff and I crashed the telegram office in the palace at Christiana, literally, with help from his reindeer. I sent a message to Lady Regina in Edinburgh, warning her of Hans' coup and that Henry is in danger. We're not exactly bosom friends, but we can both agree that his safety is our chief concern." Emma sighed. "But I don't know if she got it, or if she decided to – "

"Kristoff?" Anna exclaimed. "You met him? And Sven? Are they all right?"

Emma's insides squirmed, remembering Kristoff as she had last seen him – unconscious against the wall where Jafar's magic had thrown him. Then again, she had seen Elsa in similar straits before they left Gold's party in such a hurry, and if not precisely feeling fit as a fiddle, the queen was at least still alive. _But for how much longer?_ It was plain that whatever else Jafar had lied about, this part was terribly true. Elsa was pale and ethereal as one of her own snowflakes, wasting away to nothingness, her eyes sunk in dark hollows, her lips cracked. Black veins of poison were visible beneath her translucent-ice skin, and every so often, she stirred restlessly and cried out without waking. Anna kept watching her, anxiety written sharp and painful on her features, as her sister deteriorated.

"Fine," Emma lied at last, having no idea what else to say and wanting to spare Anna from any more gruesome truths. "He was fine. He and Sven are. . . they're. . . quite the characters."

"They are." Anna smiled faintly at the thought of her eccentric spouse and his pet (brother in arms?) "Well, anyway, it's still more important to stop Jafar. If we don't put aside our individual needs and you know, be heroes, and do what heroes do, there won't be anyone for anyone to worry about, not just us. Anyone that they loved, not that we did. Not that we don't love them, or we would if we knew them, you know, really knew them and not just thought we knew them. . . Wait, did that sound awkward? I think that sounded awkward. What I meant was – "

"We get it," Emma assured her hastily.

"Right." Robin glanced at their candle, which was burning low, grooves in the thick wax marking the passing hours. "We don't really have the leisure for a twelve-step plan. We need to find a way to stop the golem, because as the princess says, if it's raised, everyone is done for."

"And save Elsa," Anna put in urgently. "We can't forget that part."

"Those two are connected, though, aren't they? If we can find an antidote or a cure or something for the poison Jafar gave her, then the golem won't have that last blood sacrifice it needs. Even if he just runs out and kills the next random passerby, he's counting on the golem having Elsa's power. If it did, it really would be indestructible. If it was just an ordinary non-magical person. . . well, it would still be a tough row to hoe, but maybe not impossible." Emma took another deep breath, glancing between her companions. "What do you think?"

"Find if there's a way to make someone die in her place?" Robin's brow crinkled. "It sounds distasteful. But we need her to stop this winter, and we certainly can't let a murderous clay giant controlled by Jafar have her ice magic. . . so who? This is assuming we can even find an antidote at all."

"We're in the Night Market, or what was left of it." Emma gestured at their tomblike surroundings. "Surely _somebody_ has to know something about potions and poisons."

"Yes, but then what? The _Jolly_ _Roger_ has been destroyed, we can't just up and fly to Prague to stop Jafar even if we do save Elsa first. We'd have to – "

"The _Roger's. . ._ gone?" The hoarse voice came from behind them, startling everyone, and they saw Killian pushing himself upright on an elbow, grimacing. "Truly?"

"We. . . think so. It was burning when we ran." Emma hesitated, feeling oddly thick in the throat. "Hook, I. . . I know it meant a lot to you, I –

He closed his eyes and held up his hand, warding off her clumsy apology. "It's only a ship, lass," he murmured, though the lines cut deep around his mouth showed that it was clearly much more. "So long as you're safe, I'd make that trade again."

Emma's heart did that strange lurch again, and even though he was still looking at her with raw, imploring eyes, she turned her back without a word, returning to the planning session. "Can you think of something, Robin? Anything?"

"Aye," he said slowly, after a moment. "But it's dangerous. In Vauxhall Gardens, there's a display of ships and technology as part of the Great Exhibition. Since this whole mess was started by stealing something from the Exhibition – " he glanced at Will, still out for the count – "perhaps we have to bring it full circle, and steal something again."

Emma snorted mirthlessly. "Of course it's dangerous. What did we expect?"

"Point," Robin admitted. "But the last time we stole a ship, we had surprise on our side, and not much more. Can you even fly one?"

"I can try, but – " A hijacked balloon and a joyride through the skies of London did not a master pilot make, but what choice did they have?

"Don't be a fool," Killian interrupted again. "I'll have to fly the damn thing. If we think any of those prototypes are even airworthy."

"Nobody asked you," Emma snapped. "You're barely in one piece, let alone fit to accompany us on secret missions. Besides, Henry – "

He flinched. "I know, love. I know. Please. Let me help."

"Don't call me that." Emma hunched her shoulders, keeping her gaze fixed on Robin and Anna. "Well? Anyone have any other ideas, or is this the route we're going?"

A long, heavy pause. Far off she could hear water dripping. It was cold and it was wet and it was dark, and for a moment she was half convinced that she had died and simply failed to notice, her soul taken by Hades to some stygian underworld, the sad, sighing haunt of the departed. Her hands on her knees were the only thing holding her together. So much of this rode on trust, the hardest thing to ask of her. Of believing that Lady Regina would abort her vital errand in Edinburgh and rush to find Henry, that they could get another ship, that they could save Elsa in time and face the unthinkable task of allowing someone else to die in her place – for even if they did not choose that person themselves, Jafar would. She could feel Killian looking at her, in fact could almost feel his gaze boring a hole through her back, but she did not turn. They'd bring him if they had to, but she had already made herself too vulnerable with him. She still quailed inside every time she thought of the sight of him broken and semi-conscious among the rubble, her own desperate words. _Killian, come back to me._ And now, with everything on the line, the lives of everyone she loved or even hated, Jafar on the brink of ultimate, world-destroying power, it had to go far away, somewhere with the rest of the broken parts of her, and never be seen again.

"All in favor," she said, as steadily as she could.

A pause, and then Robin raised his hand. So did Anna. "Aye," they said, and so, thus, did she.

* * *

It was the hell of an operation to get Will and Elsa hoisted up in makeshift slings, Killian dissuaded from being a bloody hero, and Robin to inform the rest of the Merry Men and Night Market refugees of the leadership arrangements in his absence. After they had thoroughly canvassed the remaining magicians of actual power, they finally discovered a hedge witch, Ursula, whose shabby appearance hid formidable and not-to-be-trifled-with talents. She allowed that she indeed had a potion which would cure the poison given to Elsa, but she wanted one small thing in return: a trident, which could, coincidentally enough, be found in the same place as most of the dangerous magical artifacts in London. That would be the Royal Society's archives, and the countless items they had baldly pillaged from their rightful owners over the centuries. But as she knew they were currently pressed for time, she graciously allowed that instead of detouring in a counterproductive effort to retrieve it now, they could just defeat the Society and dismantle their defenses at a convenient moment in the near future and she would take care of popping by to fetch it herself.

Having small choice in the matter, the group agreed, and Killian took the evil-looking brew, in a small glass vial stoppered with a mermaid, with a dubious look, stashing it safely in his jacket pocket. Ursula watched them with inscrutable sea-deep eyes, then called a cryptic comment about being careful who gave it to Elsa, and promptly vanished in the gloom before they could ask her to elaborate.

This was not felt to be the most auspicious of beginnings, but indeed, there was no leisure to focus on anything but the mission. So with Killian and Emma hauling Will between them, and Robin carrying Elsa, Anna scouting ahead for obstructions, they started down the long, wet tunnel for Vauxhall.

Emma walked steadily, her arms starting to burn from Will's dead weight, even with Killian to help share the burden. He moved with enough pain to tell her that no matter the rudimentary magical-healing session she had attempted before their departure, there was still plenty of damage from his stint as a prisoner and then being involved in an airship crash. She wanted to tend to every bump and cut and bruise, mend him properly from the various scrapes the idiot kept getting himself into, but she pushed that aside. They followed the distant light of Robin's torch through the labyrinthine tunnels in silence until Killian said, "Do you remember what I told you? About Lady Regina's vault, and the enchanted people inside it?"

Emma tensed. "Yes."

"So, assuming we can stop Jafar, what are you planning to do about it?"

"Do you expect me to know? Now?" She shifted Will's feet, breath billowing silver in the clammy air. "Why do you even care about this?"

"I care because I think your boy's right, it's your family down there, and you have to find a way to set them free. You can do it, Swan. Only you."

Emma didn't answer, pretending to be fascinated by the marks etched onto the walls, legacy of the queer, feral folk who lived down here. Finally she said, "I wouldn't count on it."

"Why not?" he persisted, with that exasperating refusal to know when he should quit. "If it is. . . don't _you_ even care about them? Isn't it worth taking that chance, to find out who you really are? To save them? Your family, your parents, everyone who's ever – "

"Are you serious?" She laughed. "Captain 'I live only for revenge!' Hook trying to convince me to do something for the greater good? I can't do this, I can't – "

"Like hell you can't. You have a family, a real family, they're asleep but they're alive, and you won't even listen to the possibility of fighting for them? My family is dead, nothing I can ever do will bring him back, and yet I'd drop everything and be well on my way to Yorkshire by now if there was the remotest chance that I could. But being in complete denial about it makes it easier for you to be the fearsome Black Swan, the woman who doesn't care, the woman who runs, so you can pretend you're someone else, somewhere else! Well listen to me, Swan. You're not. You don't want to think it might really be your family because you might get hurt again, have your hopes shattered if it's not, and so you're just going to walk away. You'll use the fight against Jafar, the well-being of your boy, as excuses the day long, but that's all they are. Excuses. Because you're afraid."

"Excuse me?" She whirled on him, almost dropping Will. "Yes! Yes, I am afraid! If they are. . . if they even are my real parents, I have been alone my entire life! I grew up in an _orphanage!_ They abandoned me, they gave me up, and what if they don't want me back? What if they never did? Just because you. . . because Henry thinks this might be some wild possibility, when there's an insane sorcerer on the loose and that has to be our first – "

Their hissing whispers had risen almost to open shouting, and Robin and Anna wheeled around, confused, to see them nose to nose, bristling. Killian was glaring at her, blue eyes stormy and furious. "I think it's because you can see a future where you're not a lost girl, a future where it's worth fighting for things, for love, for family. A happy one."

"Let me guess," she bit back. "With you?"

He winced, but didn't say anything to defend himself – nor to deny the truth of her charge. And so in his silence it was confirmed: he was not the man he was when they began, that he was still here, had gone so far, nigh onto the ends of the world or further. Not because he stood to gain anything out of it; indeed, he had turned away from his revenge multiple times now, even from his beloved ship, followed her and only her, no matter how hard she tried to push him away. _Have I really been so blind?_ Or had she seen all along, but yet again, denied?

Even if so, it was patently not the moment for a heartfelt confession. Even if she had one to make. "Look," she said, struggling to master herself. "We'll discuss it later. When the crisis is over."

"There is always a bloody crisis!" He rolled his eyes heavenward, as if imploring God to take him now and thus save him from the trials of women. "Perhaps you should consider living a life during them. Otherwise you might miss it."

"And can you promise me that?" She held his gaze, the air crackling between them. "That you'll do the same? That you're actually going to live a life, and not just bide your time waiting for another shot at Gold? Because if you aren't, you have no business asking me anything like this."

Killian paused, weighing his words with utmost deliberation. Then he said quietly, "Emma. I made my choice when I went to save your son from Jafar – even if, I know, I failed. No. Not any more. I have given that path up, and I mean it. But I'm well aware that empty words don't mean a tinker's dam to you, and so I have to prove it. Very well then. When I win your heart, and I will win it, it will not be due to any trickery. It will be because you want me."

She opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again, and shut it once more. It was then at this delicate moment that they heard a groan from between them. "Bloody hell, how long _have_ I been out? Long enough for you two to finally get married, shag each other's brains out, and now I've woken up bang in the middle of the first official argument. Least I hope that was what happened in your shared grief over losin' me, otherwise it just was no point at all, was it?"

Killian jumped, the spell broken, and took a step back, glancing down. "Scarlet. You're awake."

"Nice to see you too, Cap'n. Don't put your back out rushin' to give me a tearful kiss or anything." Will grimaced. "And since you were so kind as to ask, I feel like ten tons of shit in a five-ton hole that then got pissed on. By a dog. One of those annoyin' little yappy ones that rich ladies keep in their handbags. Where the bugger are we, anyway?"

"On our way to steal another ship." Killian rolled his eyes. "And yes, we've all sorely missed your eloquent way with words. Do us a favor and go back to pretending to be dead, and we'll get it done much faster."

Will, however, did not appear (likely for the best) to have heard him. He was staring at Elsa's prone form slung over Robin's shoulder, a frown on his face. "You didn't find nuffin' to do for her? At all?"

"That's part of the plan." Killian tapped the pocket containing Ursula's potion. "As I said, while you might find it a terrible trial, keep your mouth shut, and we might just pull this off."

Will looked deeply insulted, but managed to do as instructed, and the unlikely confederation lurched back into motion. At last, Robin discerned by the wall markings that they were coming up on Vauxhall, and they ducked into the exit tunnel. The fact that all of them were currently wanted fugitives made the process of returning aboveground somewhat dicey, and they waited until it was full dark before they essayed a cautious ascent. As Elsa's eternal winter still had its teeth and claws sunk into the city, it was tenuous, slippery, and freezing going up the ladder. When they finally emerged, the night smelled like snow and smoke and the reek drifting from the tenement slums, as well as the ever-present miasma of the polluted Thames, and Emma coughed, eyes watering, as she clambered out of the manhole and stood up. She wiped her hands on her skirt, but as it was as wet and filthy as the rest of her if not more so, it did only the minimal amount of good. Before them rose the dark bulk of Vauxhall Gardens – their only hope of escape, their only chance of outracing Jafar to Prague.

With Killian leading the way (Will more or less back on his feet) they stole across the snowy path and into the shadow of the dilapidated gates. Vauxhall had once been an opulent pleasure park for rich Londoners, a menagerie of the alluring and exotic, with dancing bears, fireworks, fountains, tightrope walkers and sword-swallowers, peddlers hucking food and drink and panaceas and souvenirs, and an elaborate maze of hedgerows in which one could invariably stumble across a pair of trysting lovers. But it had fallen into financial difficulty and changed owners several times, briefly closing down a decade ago, and the current owners were trying to repair its fortunes by volunteering it to host the Vehicles & Conveyances section of the Great Exhibition: everything from crank-operated cycles to speed ahead of the plodding city crowds, to rickshaws that ran on steam, to deluxe phaetons and cabriolets, to the objects they had come in search of. A few full-sized airships were anchored in the broad plaza, looming magnificently over their lesser peons, and Emma scanned their silhouettes tersely, trying to decide which one looked the easiest to steal.

Meanwhile, Will was chinking industriously at the padlock, mumbling under his breath about the kind of work they were forcing on an invalid, until at last it gave, and the gates creaked open. The five of them (technically six, counting Elsa, still unconscious) darted inside, past a striped, empty carnival tent and a ticket booth, and Will stopped to eye it up. "Sure we can't do a little shoppin' while we're here? There might be some takings left in – "

"Come on, Scarlet," Killian growled, snagging him by the collar and pulling him along. This was cause for more comments from Will as to how they were not respecting his fragile state, at least until Emma turned around and glared violently at them both, which was sufficient to stun them into silence. By night, glazed in ice, everything was a weird, wild winter wonderland. All the attractions were transformed into twisted grotesqueries of lucent blue glass, and crystalline daggers hung from the wrought-iron work and the crossbars of the streetlamps. Their footsteps squeaked in the snow, leaving an unmistakable path, and in some places the drifts were nearly up to their knees. Only Anna seemed dauntless, even when she went knee-deep into a frozen brooklet. "Cold," she muttered to herself. "Cold cold cold cold cold."

Mishap overcome, they continued carefully picking their way across the square, keeping to the shadows as much as possible, until they were standing directly beneath the airships. One was some sort of slow, lumbering pleasure barge for the moneyed aristocracy to take leisurely flights in the countryside, one was stripped to the planks to show its inner workings, and the third looked, in fact, rather like a pirate ship. Larger and more ornate than the _Roger,_ it had been meticulously refurbished, mahogany siding polished to a gleaming shine and black silk zeppelin kept oiled and sleek. Apparently, as strongly as the British Empire and the Royal Society might object to pirates actually practicing their trade, as long as they were kept safely contained and put on show, their commercial appeal could be cynically (and profitably) exploited.

Killian, apparently reaching the same conclusion, snorted angrily, but did not allow himself to be derailed. He, Will, and Robin stole around the anchor chain, testing how firmly it was tethered, as Anna and Emma started to climb it, in much the same fashion she had earlier ascended the _Roger's_ moorline. With Elsa tied to her back this time, it was more difficult, but fortunately the queen barely weighed anything, and she still made it up fairly expeditiously. She hauled herself onto the deck twenty feet off the ground, glanced down, and had that premonition ice-cold down her back, the same sense that everyone who lived one step ahead of the law knew too well, half a second before gunfire carved the night to shreds.

 _"Killian!"_ The name was torn out of her throat before she had time to think about it, as she threw herself to the side in panic, staring wildly down at the ducking and skittering figures of the three men. She couldn't even be sure from which direction the shooting was coming, just that it was, with the distinctive burned-ozone scent that meant these were not merely any rifles, but aether-powered ones, the proprietary weapon of the Royal Society's personal bodyguards. Apparently they had either known or guessed that the pirate ship at the Gardens would prove a too-tempting target for a sticky-fingered pirate captain lately finding himself without one, and had dispatched their resources accordingly. Lain in wait, let them walk into the thick of the trap, and then sprung it.

Emma burned the mooring chain loose without a second thought, hands flaring violent gold, and Anna sprinted to the gas pump and set to with equally vigorous attention. Fortunately this routine of powering up a stolen airship was familiar to Emma from her recent previous escapades with the _Roger,_ and quite soon they had it chugging to life. It was a much older model, though it had been modernized, and she had a brief moment of wondering who this had belonged to in its past life. But that was another question that would have to wait until the men were safe.

She hauled the wheel out of steering lock and dove, skimming as low as possible along the ground to knock down some of the soldiers like ninepins, feeling bullets peppering the underside of the keel with flashes of magical golden dust. Anna was hung over the side with a rope as Emma cut as much of the thrust as she dared and remained just a few feet off the ground, almost weightless, until she heard a heavy thump and saw a mess of straining bodies somersault aboard. Three – no, four. One of them was a Royal Society man in proper serge blue uniform and brass buttons, and he had a death grip on Killian's ankle, clawing for his gun with the other.

Emma raised her hands, and felt the blowback of her magic tear through her hard enough to physically throw her against the railing. Killian kicked at his opponent, got his sword out, and slashed, but the Royal Society man dove for his rifle and caught it with a rendering, horrible screech on the bayonet. Anna was desperately sawing at the rope as the ship jerked and swung wildly, the rest of the man's companions on the ground trying to drag it down; grapnel hooks carved flying splinters out of the railing as Robin and Will bolted along the deck, slashing at them with their own knives. Emma rolled dazedly to her feet and had to grab the swinging wheel to keep them from crashing, driving them skyward with a groaning, grinding clank of unused gears. Royal Society men still hung like beads on a string from the trailing ropes, climbing, climbing.

Killian and his current foe were battling back and forth like a pair of titans, sword and bayonet cutting in brutal, mesmerizingly beautiful arcs and loops and lashes, over and under and from side to side, every direction at once. Then the deck tilted at a crazy angle, and they lost their footing, scrambling and slashing even as they plunged, Killian snagging a rope with his hook and hauling off with one maddened, final effort as the Royal Society man slid past. There was a gurgle, a streak of crimson sheeting along the planks, and the limp body fell into the abyss.

"Bloody. . . hell," Killian croaked at last, eyes still closed, flat on his back as Emma restored them to an angle more often found in the course of nature. They kept climbing into the heavy, snowbound clouds, shafts of moonlight towering down between the iron-shod anvils. "Bloody. . . bloody. . . hell."

She couldn't stand it any longer. Foisting off the wheel on Robin, she threw herself down from the pilot house and sprinted toward him, boots skidding in the dead man's blood. Her hands frantically palpated him all over. "Killian. . . Killian. . . . are you. . . are you . . . ?"

"I'm fine, love," he groaned, eyelashes fluttering feebly, and she didn't even have the heart to tell him not to call her that. "But can we please, please not do that again?"

"We'll – we'll try." She felt so giddily relieved that she would have promised anything. "You have to set us a course for Prague, as far and as fast as we can go. Come on." She slid a hand under his back and helped him sit up, still huddling close. He did look better after a few wheezing breaths, and the knot in her own chest eased somewhat. But where was the rest of the blood still coming from, in a slow dark trickle across the boards? Not from the dead Royal Society man, not from Killian, from –

They both turned around at the same instant to see Will Scarlet half-sitting, half-sprawling against the gunwale, hand pressed to a spreading dark flower in his chest. They likewise made the same noise and skidded on their knees toward him, and he gave them a pained half-smile. "This good. . . enough. . . at playin' dead for you. . . . Cap'n?"

 _"_ You arsehole," Killian breathed, in a voice Emma had never heard from him. _"_ You got yourself _shot?"_

"Actually. . . think the bugger was aimin' for ya. . . but he might have missed." Will shrugged, with an effort. "Last time I was bleedin' all over your ship after we nicked somethin' from the Great Exhibition, you turned around and abandoned me in London. You goin'. . . to do that this time?"

"No." Killian's eyes remained fixed on him. "Not this time."

"Thanks. Knew you were warmin' up to me." Will's eyes moved past them, to where Anna, clutching Elsa protectively, was staring at them. "Wait! Bloody hell! What about her?"

"Just. . . hold on for a damn second so I can see that, all right?" Killian tore at the soaked shreds of Will's shirt. "Emma, love, can you – ?"

Will reached up and clamped his hand over Killian's, pulling his fingers away. "You can't do nothin'," he said gently. "You know that. Now what were you doin' for Elsa?"

"Well, this, but – " Killian fumbled out the potion that Ursula had given them. "She said it would cure the poison, but to be careful who gave it to – "

Will didn't let him finish. He plucked the vial out of Killian's hand, slid on his knees across the deck, and gently put his other hand beneath Elsa's head, lifting the potion to her lips. The dark, glutinous liquid burbled into her mouth, as everyone watched tensely, especially Anna. Emma found her hand seeking out, searching for Killian's, and he took it, squeezing hard. There they remained, until Elsa abruptly gasped, choked, spat some of the black gunk out, and rolled over onto her side, coughing.

"Elsa!" Anna cried, crawling through the crowd to hug her sister tightly. "Are you all right?"

"I. . . " Elsa coughed again, color reappearing in her dead-white cheeks, the black veins of poison fading and vanishing. "I think so. I. . . what. . . . what happened?"

In search of an answer, they glanced at Will, and all of them sucked in their breath. The mottled dark streaks were appearing on him instead as they watched, turning his skin almost the color and consistency of clay, and at once, Emma understood what had happened, what the potion had done. It had saved Elsa's life, yes – by transferring the poison to the person who gave it to her. Now it was Will whose life was being drained into the vat of mud under St. Vitus Cathedral, Will whose blood would serve as the final sacrifice to raise the golem. But – _no,_ she had never wanted –

"Will?" Elsa's voice sounded small and frightened. "Will, what did you do?"

"It's all right, eh?" He coughed. "We already agreed that we couldn't let Jafar have the bloody monster with your power as part of it. Now. . . well, I s'pose it's me instead. Best that it is. I don't do magic, or captain a ship, or lead a group of outlaws, and I'm not a queen nor a princess. Mind, sometimes I say funny things, but. . . " He coughed more blood. "You'll get along without that."

"No. There has to be a way to save you. I can't. I can't let you do this." Elsa reached for him. "Why would you even – "

Will gave her a faint, crooked smile. "Guess."

Elsa opened and shut her mouth. While she was still at a loss for words, Will turned to Emma and Killian, clearly straining with all his might to stay conscious. "You two. Once I've bit it, you'd damn well better admit you fancy each other, you always have, and you want to live happily ever after with ten bouncing pirate babies. Otherwise I'll come back and haunt ya, and you'll never be bloody rid of me. Got it?"

Killian looked flattened. "Will. . . "

Emma felt a hot rush of tears prickling her eyes. She couldn't watch, couldn't do it, couldn't, and she turned away, even as she heard Killian and Elsa shift position behind her, lifting Will into their arms, making him as comfortable as they could. "Look at the sky," she heard Will say drowsily. "Damn if there aren't a million stars."

Emma stood up, lurching to the rail. She thought she had heard something about golems once, that they borrowed life only, were not truly real creatures on their own. That if they were defeated, the life had to return to its original owner – but that was just a story, it didn't matter, Will had been shot as well. No saving him. No saving them. No saving anyone. No savior.

Killian's words. Again. _You have to find a way to set them free. You can do it, Swan. Only you._

Emma shook her head again like a horse with a bee in its ear, rubbing at the tarnished wooden railing beneath her hand. Then she frowned. There were words engraved here, old and ornate lettering – the name of the ship, she realized after a moment more, and read them, one after the other, like a punch in the gut.

_Queen Anne's Revenge._

"Killian – " She whirled around. "Killian, this is – "

He wasn't listening. None of them were. The poison was curling black and thick, faster and faster, and Will was almost gone. "Better it's me," he said, even more faintly and faraway. "I'll likely make the golem really bloody stupid, that's got to help you out."

Killian choked. But Elsa leaned over him, never taking her eyes off him, and his own flicked to hers. With the last bit of his breath, he whispered, "Kiss for a dying man?"

Elsa remained (so to speak) frozen a moment longer, then bent over him, her curtains of white-blonde hair shining luminous around their faces in the moonlight. Their lips met for a long moment, his hand struggling to cup around her head, but it never made it. It fell away and he sighed one more time into her mouth, then settled back in Elsa and Killian's arms, looked up at the brilliant starlit heavens with an expression of childlike awe, and died.


	21. Chapter 21

The lantern hung from the crossbeam swayed and swung wildly, as Emma could hear the rain drumming on the stout weathered siding of their stolen vessel like a handful of thrown rocks. Deeply mindful of the fact that all her recent airship voyages had ended in a crash or other assorted calamity, she kept glancing nervously at the ceiling, but thus far the _Revenge_ seemed to be holding steady. _And that may just be the most ironic name in the history of irony._ She couldn't be sure if it was the same craft that had belonged to the infamous pirate Blackbeard, killed almost a century and a half earlier by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard in single combat off the coast of North Carolina in the Americas, but there could not be many of this name and description still in existence. It stood to reason that the British Empire would want to keep his flagship around as a particularly pointed trophy of war, and now that they had helped themselves to said flagship, aggravated wounds old and new. . .

Not that any of it would matter if they did not reach Prague and stop Jafar from using the now-fully armed and operational golem, and Emma looked over the floor to where Elsa sat across from her, silently wetting strips of linen and wrapping them around the lifeless statue of what had been Will Scarlet. His body had turned fully into clay upon his death, mottled in grey and black like old stone, and upon hearing that there was the faintest chance he could be saved if the golem was defeated and its stolen life force returned, Elsa had straightaway carried him below with Killian's help and set to preserving him in his present state, so the clay would not grow brittle and shatter. Seeing as one of the more macabre pastimes of wealthy and idle Londoners was to buy real Egyptian mummies and hold soirees to unwrap them like elaborate gifts, Emma surely hoped that poor Will, who had been by any measure through more than enough, would not get mistaken as a party favor. She had to bite her lip, fighting a demented urge to laugh.

Choking it down, she climbed off the narrow berth and moved to join Elsa. "Can I help?" she asked, picking up one of the torn linen strips. To her surprise, it already felt damp, even though there was no visible water bucket, and she checked again, nervously, for leaks. Then she saw that the source of it was Elsa herself. Instead of snowflakes or ice or the usual wintry manifestations of her magic, her fingers were bleeding rain, bleak and grey as English sleet. As she hitched in an unsteady breath, fighting to keep herself under control, the distant racket outside increased in volume, and Emma realized that this was no natural storm, nor even a conjuration of the aeromancers such as had chased them to Prague the first time. It was grief, Elsa's grief, magically and dangerously magnified, a sky of the tears the queen herself would not shed.

Emma hesitated, then reached for Elsa's hand, feeling the cold droplets slither down her sleeve. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I really am. But we can still fight, we have to try to bring down the golem, and I know I can't do it by myself. We'll need our magic, both of our magic."

Elsa opened and shut her mouth, trembling like a spooked horse. She angrily smudged the back of her free hand across her face, further disheveling the thick, pale tresses of hair that lay undone on her shoulders, then swallowed hard. With control born of a lifetime of royal poise, of concealing and not feeling, she lifted her big blue eyes to Emma's. "I'll be ready. When the time comes. I'm going to show Jafar what a mistake he's made, make him rue the day he ever thought he could use me or anyone else like this. But right now. . ." Her voice wavered. "Right now I think I want to be alone."

Emma, somewhat close kin to that feeling herself, paused, then nodded, letting go of Elsa's cold hand. Leaving the queen and the shell of Will behind, she got up and stepped out into the narrow, black hallway, which smelled of rain and salt and must. She leaned against the wall, bracing her feet as they jostled through a formidable, miles-high pillar of fog that engulfed the horizon, just visible through the dripping porthole. The _Revenge_ was bigger than the _Roger,_ and more comfortably equipped, albeit in a stripped-down, old-fashioned way; most of its original fittings and luxuries had been removed upon the death of its master and its capture by the Navy. It also carried at least twice as many guns, would have been ranked a third-rater or higher compared to the modest sixth rate of the _Roger,_ but that did them very little good when there was nothing to load them with. Emma had already been down to the dank darkness of the hold and groped in every mildewed corner, barking her shins more times than she could possibly count, but obviously the government had not been so foolish as to put a pirate ship on display while fully armed and ready for bear, and not even a few grains of saltpeter or a spare cannonball could be found. Indeed, if it came to an aerial engagement, their only strategy would be to load Killian's hook, a few pewter forks, and the broken grapnels into the bow chaser and pray.

Emma grimaced at the thought of Killian, whom she had been doing her best to put from her mind, but it occurred to her that he might be mourning Will's loss as well – despite everything, at the end, a genuine bond had been revealed between the pirate and the young thief. So as the airship continued to be buffeted in the turbulent clouds, Emma resumed her precarious balancing act down the hall, toward what she was reasonably certain were the captain's quarters. She lifted the brass gargoyle knocker and thumped it, then when an indistinct voice answered from inside, let herself in.

Killian was sitting by the stern windows, jacket off and vest mostly unbuttoned, booted feet propped up on some antique endtable that had doubtless been pilfered from who knew where by the _Revenge's_ previous tenants. He was sipping from his trusty rum flask, hooked arm braced on the sideboard, and staring out into the witch's cauldron of the sky with no apparent interest in anything, but he glanced around when he saw her. "Swan. Don't let a man drink alone, aye?"

Emma shut the door behind her and crossed the room, a sudden jolt as she reached his chair making him flash up his good hand to steady her. The rum spilled in shining gold droplets across the floor, which he regarded with annoyance, but nonetheless kept hold of her until she had her feet under her again. "Thank you," she said stiffly. "Who's steering the ship?"

"She's tending herself. Not hard if you set a course and lock it into the lodestone." Killian wiped his mouth unsteadily. "Though if you'd really wanted to know that badly, you would have gone up to the deck and looked, not down here."

Emma shot him a wary sidelong glance, but said nothing, easing into the chair next to his. As they were both upholstered in gilded brocade with high mahogany backs (clearly Blackbeard had had a taste for the finer things in life) she had the odd sensation that they were seated side by side in majestic thrones, king and queen of the celestial realms gazing down upon their subjects far below. She quickly shook away the unsettling fantasy. "I'm sorry about Will."

Killian grunted but did not answer, taking another healthy swig of rum. Then he offered it to her, and she took a sip, the smooth, potent burn of it flashing all the way down to her stomach and settling there like a kindled ember. Her eyes widened and she took another as he watched her intently, as if to see if it was too strong for her. It wasn't. She swallowed and actually did feel marginally steadier. "Jamaican?"

He arched one dark eyebrow, in that habit he had. "As a matter of fact, yes. There is – or was – a certain English sugarcane plantation there, but some years back the slaves rose up and killed the masters, and escaped into the woods to join the revolts. Eventually they returned to use the plantation as a place for their vodou, to communicate with the loa and have the _bokor_ practice their magic. They make this stuff there as well, and I know a houngan, he sells it to me by the barrel whenever I'm in the Caribbean. As long as I fight the British Empire. The enemy."

Emma absorbed this in surprised interest. By nature she had only really heard about the proper variant of magic, taught to educated men in high ivory towers, as this was the only sort the Royal Society deemed relevant. Even in her experience in the Night Market and the underworld, and her own discovery of herself as a savant, she had never thought about the magic of other places, other people. _Whenever I'm in the Caribbean. . ._ it sounded impossibly far away, impossibly free, to someone who had never left Europe. "Does it do anything special?"

Killian shrugged, lifting the flask to his lips again. "It's supposed to make you brave. I've never known if it works or not, but I won't buy my rum anywhere else."

That twisted Emma's heart, in a way she couldn't explain. "You hardly appear to need help."

"Oh, do I not?" He laughed, without humor. "It's never made me brave enough to face the one thing I fear more than everything else. Losing another person I love."

Emma colored and looked down at her hands. "Will – I know he was your. . . your friend, but as I said, there's still a chance we could save – "

"Aye." Killian took another long drink. "But he didn't know that when he did it, did he? All he knew was that he was sacrificing himself for the woman he loved, so she could live no matter the cost, and that was the only thing which mattered. No regrets, no second thoughts, not a single moment of fear. _He_ didn't need any bravery rum. In the end, he was the better man. That's why he's dead, and I'm still here. It's always been that way. Only the worst thrive in this world."

The raw emotion in his voice made Emma wince. "Killian," she said softly, after a moment. "I don't think you're the worst in the world."

He jerked around to stare at her, clearly taken completely aback that she would even think such a thing, much less voice it. Then he laughed again, even more hollowly. "If you think that, lass, I'd say you don't know me very well at all."

"Maybe I know you better than you know yourself." She took the flask back and helped herself to another sip. She could use some liquid courage herself. "You're. . . different. Than I thought."

"Even after I didn't save your son?"

"That's. . . not your fault." The absolution felt heavy on her tongue, matching the small shattered part of her that would not be healed until Henry was found. "It's Jafar's. That's why we're going to find him, and we're going to take him down."

Killian flicked a sidelong gaze at her under his lashes, but evidently didn't feel up to venturing whatever had just occurred to him. Instead he upturned the flask and drank, the muscles of his throat working steadily, until the last of the rum was gone, and he was gulping hoarsely as he came up for air with a gasp. Then he started to rise from his chair, evidently in search of more, but Emma reached out and clasped her hand over his.

They both made startled noises, eyes flashing to where they were touching, as his hand turned slowly until her fingers rested in his palm, his own closing over them, caressing in a light, tentative, tender gesture. His head was bent as if in veneration, and she remembered the look on his face as he lit a candle for his mother in the darkness of St. Vitus Cathedral – the place to which they were now returning, and, if things went ill, might never leave. She almost pulled away, her overwhelming natural instinct, but this once, fought it down. She let him touch her, his ringed fingers traveling slowly up her wrist, circling the birdlike hollows of the bone. He stroked up to the dimple of her elbow, then slid back down along the length of her forearm, as if working a different kind of enchantment, a simpler and stronger and purer magic, into her flesh and sinew, the warp and weft of her soul.

She was the one to gasp as if coming up from a very deep dive this time, shifting her weight and tipping forward on the balls of her feet. She moved to stand over him as he continued to look up at her, unblinking. Then he reached up with the hook, catching the fabric of her ragged skirt, and pulled her down into his lap.

Emma uttered an involuntary whine, knees spreading, as his good hand rubbed over the small of her back, where her corset had worn painful whalebone grooves into her flesh. She let herself sink onto him, their foreheads and then their mouths finding each other as her fingers curled into the whorl of dark hair at the back of his neck. After their earlier, more passionate kisses, this one was gentle, yearning, almost sad, lips and teeth and tongue, without a word exchanged between them. In the middle of all this toil and trouble, this pain and uncertainty, she felt safe to the marrow of her bones there, in his arms. He made no move to demand more of her, letting her dictate the pace and control of the encounter, and she was struck anew by the paradoxes of him, the jarring contrast between the arrogant, cocksure, brutal pirate captain and the quiet, careful, considerate lover, the man who reached up to brush her cheek with his thumb as if she was made of the finest China porcelain. The cracks she saw, whenever both of them dared to let their walls down far enough to glimpse, like a mirror of her own, like some far-off promised land.

She gasped softly into his mouth, and all at once both of them surged forward harder, pulling and possessing, as he drew her lower lip between his teeth and sucked, then moved to press kisses down her throat. It was completely unfeigned adoration, without a single damn thing he could hope to gain from her, and she responded in kind. His hand came up to pull at the knotted laces of her corset, swearing as he could make no headway, and she reached down to assist, loosening them until her breasts swelled free. He buried his face in them, kissing, worshiping, and she arched her back as he used hand and hook to take a good firm grip on her arse, scooting her closer to him. She returned the favor, unbuttoning his already half-undone vest, and slid her hands under the fabric to run along the hard lines of his dark-furred chest. Their mouths continued to lock, twisting and tangling, as their breath came in sounds like sobs and her eyes fluttered half-closed. She couldn't think what had taken her so long to do this.

Just then, the ship rocked and veered hard starboard, dislodging Emma from Killian's lap, and he sat up quickly, at once alert for the possibility of incoming attack. The moment broken, both of them hastily did up their clothes and hurried up to the deck together, where Killian went to commandeer the wheel and Emma went to double-check their coordinates on the chart. Aye, they were just a few leagues out of Prague, and one drawback of their current vessel meant that it was too old be equipped, like the _Roger,_ with the silver aerials that detected and intercepted attacks natural, mechanical, or magical. Which meant, essentially, they were descending blind into hell.

"Can you see anything down there?" Killian bellowed, banking the ship into a long, sweeping turn to burn off some of its momentum and altitude. "Is the bloody city even still standing?"

Emma peered desperately through the thick layers of cloud that smothered the hilltops and the Vltava river valley. She couldn't see a thing, not even a church steeple or gothic spire. "I can't tell. Why would Jafar want to destroy _Prague,_ though? It's his ally, his home – "

"Who knows? He's a bloody lunatic!" It was clearly taking all of Killian's concentration to keep the big airship, several times the size of his own small, swift _Roger,_ from plunging into any number of unseen obstacles, and clearly likewise sensing that things were about to get interesting, Robin and Anna popped out of the deck hatch. They too assumed position as lookouts, but in this case, six eyes were not better than two. The murk remained inscrutable.

Little by little, in agonizing fits and starts, Killian brought the _Revenge_ under control, lower and lower, until Prague began to appear like an eerie ghost. There certainly did not appear to be any evidence of a murderous clay giant on the rampage, yet, but that meant nothing. They still had to find some way to even think about fighting it, and Emma was drawing a blank. Golems were impervious to all ordinary weapons, and while even it might have been daunted by a full broadside from the _Revenge's_ cannons, they of course had nothing to load into them, and that would result in plenty of extra damage. Maybe Will's last words would be right – if the golem did not have Elsa's magic, it would be weaker, and Elsa herself and Emma could theoretically take it down. But Elsa's magic was no sure thing right now, and Emma's. . .

Caught helplessly in the wind vortex like a leaf in a current, they whirled and sank and pinwheeled down to a hard, skidding landing, kicking up a long plume of water on the river. But at least the ship stayed in one piece, which was an improvement over previous adventures, and Killian finally managed to wrestle it to a halt before it plowed into a cluster of small, brightly painted gypsy houseboats. They bobbed on the choppy gunmetal water like a cork, unable to get close enough to the dock to make berth, until Robin tied a long rope to two of his arrows, aimed for a wooden piling, and shot.

The impromptu moorline strained and swayed and nearly pulled loose, but held long enough for them to contrive something a bit stronger, and they hauled and heave-hoed into port until they bumped against the quay. Anna darted back below, and finally emerged with a pale and unsteady-looking Elsa. "Come on," she said bracingly. "We just need to defeat the golem, and then everything will be fine! Well, not completely fine, because we still need to get home and see if Kristoff is all right and that Hans has been kicked out and everything else, but really, it'll go a long way toward solving a lot of problems, so yes. We can do this!"

Elsa, lips pressed together, mustered up a grim smile for her sister, but said nothing. The five of them, their own odd little pirate crew, stepped warily into the cold, dour streets of Prague, which had the distinct aspect of having its hatches battened down hard in anticipation of an oncoming storm. Only a few rats scuttled out of their path as they climbed the steep, narrow lane, and as they passed one of the lit streetlamps, it abruptly snuffed out. A great and sentient shadow seemed to whisper and sigh at their heels, streaming over the crooked rooftops, and Emma, who knew enough about golems to also know that this strange darkness was one of the heralds of their presence, grabbed at Killian's sleeve. "I think. . . I think it's coming."

He tensed, putting his hand to his sword, and Robin nocked an arrow to his bow – both of which would prove, if anything, only absurdly brief deterrence. They gathered in a circle, back to back, as they could now hear distant, thundering footfalls a few alleys over. So that was why the place was deserted. The citizens of Prague must know, must remember, must be able to see that a golem was coming, and so were hiding, and praying.

A monstrous head appeared over the roofs, blind except for the etched orb embedded in it like Cyclops' one terrible eye. The rest of the golem was equally crude – twenty feet tall, built of rough grey-black clay, shedding broken chips and dust with each heavy footfall, with three-fingered hands that could have choked the life from a full-grown stallion, it was huge, horrifying, and inexorable. It came toward them with the slow, ponderous pace of a predator who knew it had nothing to fear from its prey, and could toy with and then dispose of them at its leisure.

"Aim for the eye," Emma ordered. "Or the mouth. The eye is what allows Jafar to control it, the _shem_ in its mouth is what animates it. Elsa – come on, I need you – come on, on three – "

But they never even made it to one. At that moment, the golem lunged at them with striking-snake speed, and they dove to either side as its massive hand punched through a brick wall like flimsy silk. Robin got a shot off, but the arrow spun and bounced harmlessly away, and the golem took even less notice of it than it would have of a bee sting. Curiously, its interest seemed to be fixed on only one of them. As Killian slashed back the groping clay fingers with sword and hook, it contemptuously flicked the blade away, which went clattering in the street. Then it grabbed the pirate around the middle and lifted him into the air, as Killian cursed and kicked and struggled to absolutely no result, and galumphed away.

"HEY!" Emma broke into a sprint after it, her running not able to match even one of the golem's giant strides, as it knocked gargoyles from roofs and cracked the cobbles. She was so enraged that it didn't even occur to her to look if the others were following, but they were. They sped around a turn, Robin trying another shot which this time lodged in the golem's misshapen lump of a head, but not near enough the eye or the _shem_ to do any damage. They ascended another hill, and it was then that she realized where they were going: up toward the spectral shape of Prague Castle, and St. Vitus Cathedral, towering on its black crag. _Jafar. Jafar must be there._

The thought of finally coming to grips with the man, even if nothing else, was enough to spur Emma on, her laced boots splashing in the muddy puddles, thick with dust from the golem's passing. The giant itself was lumbering up the portico of the cathedral, to where a lone figure, hair whipping impressively in the wind, was waiting for it. It made an aristocratic gesture, and the golem lifted Killian toward the stormy sky, like a signaling beacon.

Emma, Robin, Elsa, and Anna caught up in the next instant, out of breath from the chase. The figure – sure enough, it was Jafar, dressed even more stylishly than usual in a sharp-cut suit, waistcoat, and silk cravat – turned with an archly welcoming expression, apparently unsurprised to see them. In one hand, he held the black knife that Emma had seen him with at Gold's masquerade ball, the one that had given her such a terrible turn, a feeling of darkness, of tears in the world, of creeping demons. "Miss Swan, Your Majesty, Your Highness, _and_ the outlaw Hood. Welcome to my small soiree."

"Give him back." Emma planted her feet and held out her hands. "Now."

Jafar smiled pleasantly. "I don't think so, my dear. Why would I do that? When I have the British Empire's most loathed pirate captain, the famed mercenary Black Swan, the leader of the Night Market refugees, the queen of Norway, _and_ its heiress apparent in my possession at last? Not mention, of course, the fact that this eminent confederation numbers _two_ savants among its members. I must thank you. I was laboring to think of something to bring you all to me, but then you decided to play the heroes, and solved my problem."

With that, he waved the black knife like a wand, and the stone under their feet hissed and smoked, enclosing them in a burned pentagram. All five points of the star flared with demonic light, and as Emma made a run at it, intending to see if she could burst through by magical main force, it threw her bone-jarringly back into Elsa, who staggered. Jafar gave her a reprimanding look. "So sorry, Miss Swan, but we are expecting one more guest at this party, and until he arrives, I can't have any of you leaving early. Please believe me when I say that this hurts me far more than it hurts you."

"Like hell," Emma growled, but she could tell that a second attempt would result in permanent damage, and she was not going to kill herself before she had one good shot at him. So, against every instinct in her body, she stayed still, all of them waiting with bated breath, the golem still holding Killian high in the air, until at last, a second airship descended from the clouds above them. This one had a zeppelin of gold silk, not black, the emblem of the Crown emblazoned on the side, and as it swept in for a landing, Emma realized in dawning horror just who it was. But nothing about that made sense. The two magicians had been fighting tooth and nail, facing off at the masquerade ball in Monaco and then in Westminster Abbey, Gold the very paragon of the Royal Society and Jafar its most avowed nemesis, so what, _what –_

As the ramp lowered and the trim, genteel figure of Robert Gold limped off, leaning on his ivory-handled walking stick, Emma glanced desperately at the sky, hoping the storm would break and the rain come down – the golem was made of clay, even it could not be completely impervious to a good drenching torrent. But it did not, and Gold, glancing up at the distance to the cathedral plaza, decided that there was no way he was submitting himself to a humiliating, painful climb with everyone watching. He raised a hand, clicked his fingers, and vanished on the spot – only to reappear just a few feet away from Jafar, teeth bared in something that was categorically not a smile. "How nice of you to arrange this little get-together."

Jafar smiled back, inclining his head graciously. "Indeed. I seem to have done much of your work for you, in fact. As you will see, I had my pet hold up the pirate so your pilot knew where to land, and shortly, in fact, I expect to be handing him over to your custody."

"Do you?" Gold planted his walking stick in front of him like a warrior leaning on his sword. "How generous. Normally, a commendation from the Queen and installation as a Knight Commander of the British Empire would be the proper reward for capturing a criminal of such magnitude, but I doubt you want that, do you?"

 _"Au contraire._ I desire it most ardently, and it will be one of the things you shall arrange to procure for me once we get back to London. Don't you see?" Jafar gestured at the golem, Killian squeezed in its hand, and Emma and the others trapped in the burning pentagram. "I've won, Robert. And on some level you must already know that, or you wouldn't be here."

"You are gravely mistaken, dearie. As a matter of fact, I'm here to kill you." Gold dropped the cane, unbuttoned his smoking jacket, and shrugged it off, flexing his fingers. "So sorry."

Jafar did not appear in the least concerned. In fact, he appeared delighted, and with a flourish, held up the black knife. "You will remember this, won't you, or is that another thing that's slipped your mind? I brought it to your party back in Monaco. The _arthame_ from the Key of Solomon. At the time, I asked you to give me the third of three bottles, so I could complete my collection, elsewise I would release this – " he gestured negligently at the golem – "on the city of London. I have given you plenty of time, so really, your continued failure to comply has forced me to drastic measures. You have no one to blame but yourself."

Gold laughed scornfully. "You're going to wave that tinpot toy at me and call it the _arthame?_ You're very amusing, but when I wish to watch a comedy, I go to Drury Lane and sit in my very own private box. You have plagued me long enough with your wearisome ways, and now – "

With that, he ripped something out of his cane, brandishing it before him – but as fast as he moved, Jafar, who was at least fifteen years younger, was faster. As a stream of lethal golden light flooded from the President of the Royal Society's fingers, Jafar caught it on the blade of the black knife, the _arthame_ devouring the magic so completely that it seemed to suck down the air as well, leaving dark stains and slashes, tears in the fabric of the world. Then the darkness billowed back like eager snakes from Medusa's hair, thronging around Gold's wrists and ankles, spiraling up arms and legs, forcing itself into his mouth as it opened in a silent scream, threading through every pore in his body. Much as she hated him, Emma still could barely stand to watch – it was an unease that felt almost physical, as if the blackness was penetrating her as well, coiling into her soul and sinew, until –

Until, she realized in horror, it wasn't just her imagination. The force of it was capturing her too, pulling her free of the pentagram, as she tottered to Gold's side like a badly strung puppet, helpless in the thrall of the enchantment. From somewhere far above, she could hear Killian swearing, bellowing her name, but she could not answer. She and Gold simply stood side by side as the black magic finished its weaving, burning and biting. It felt like something, someone else was in her body, an alien consciousness in her head, controlling, commanding, and there was no way to shut it out. She just waited, powerless.

"Well, well," Jafar said, regarding the pair of them with poorly disguised delight. "I did not expect _that,_ but I must say, it is a completely welcome development. Please, Robert, share if you would how such a thing might have come to pass?"

Gold's eyes were still murderous, but his mouth was forced open nonetheless. "The contract," he said flatly. "Which Miss Swan signed with me at the beginning of her employment to hunt down the Captain – a charge at which she has spectacularly failed, by the by, so I see no reason to hope she will do better for you. But nonetheless, she signed it without reading it, a rather common mistake. Otherwise, she might have seen that it specifically stipulated that if I was to fall under any sort of magical coercion or catastrophe, the same would become of her."

 _The contract._ It took a moment for the full impact of this to batter its way through Emma's dazed head. Then she remembered. The visit to Kensington Palace, Gold's promise of unimaginable riches and renown in exchange for taking down Hook – she hadn't finished reading it before she signed it, too tempted, too desperate for this to be her big break, to earn enough to leave behind the bounty-hunting trade forever, to make a real home with Henry. Instead, now, she had lost everything. Somehow, Jafar had used the black knife to put Gold under his control, and that apparently meant her as well. _He's right. He's won._ Now he could order her to undo the defensive wards on the Stone of Scone and the Chair of St. Edward, and she would have no choice but to obey. _And after?_ Whatever foul purpose he wanted a savant for, it would be her end.

"Bloody hell!" That was Killian, still struggling vainly in the golem's grasp, twenty feet overhead. "You promised! You swore a bloody oath! In Monaco! That it would be my life instead of hers! _You swore!"_

Jafar glanced up at his former associate with well-mannered regret. "Did I? Let us not forget, Captain, that you lost that wager. It _did_ fall red, not black. And did you actually think I would consent to let you take her place, after I had striven so long to find a _real_ savant for my studies? The insult to magic and science alike would be intolerable. Love blinded you, Captain. It always has, it always will. A pity you spent it on someone so undeserving."

Emma couldn't breathe. _What does he – what did he – ?_ She could hear Killian's voice in their conversation aboard the _Revenge,_ talking about Will and what he had done for Elsa. _But he didn't know that when he did it, did he? All he knew was that he was sacrificing himself for the woman he loved, so she could live no matter the cost, and that was the only thing which mattered._ Had Killian made some sort of Faustian bargain with Jafar, trying to save her life, and never once told her, been willing to die for her unhesitatingly? But how could that even be. . .

"Emma's worth a thousand of you," Killian spat back. "And I'd do it again every time. So kill me now if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that you'll lose. She'll beat you."

Jafar laughed openly. "When she is under my control? I'd love to see how that works. But, Captain, as you wish. Doubtless our mutual friend here shall be disappointed in being foiled of his aim – he did so much wish to put you up to the spectacle of a grand trial and execution before all the impressionable masses of London. But instead, you'll just. . . disappear."

With that, he made a swift motion to the golem, and it turned abruptly, lumbered to the edge of the crag on which the castle and cathedral stood, and swung its hand out. Then, as Killian tried madly to claw into the clay with his hook, to do anything, it tipped him over into thin air.

Emma's scream caught in her throat. She was barely aware of a blast of magic searing past her – Elsa had both hands outstretched, ignoring the fiery manacles of the pentagram that tried to pull her back, a current of sheer silver-white power crackling and freezing the place where Killian had fallen. Emma had heard no sound of impact, had no idea what had happened, her mind blank with terror. _Did she save him? Was it too late? Oh God, no, no, no. . ._ Her mouth was moving without making a sound, her entire body locked in a useless litany of denial. She felt dumb and clumsy as if she too was made of clay, like the golem an unthinking monstrosity under Jafar's control. _No. Killian. No._

"Regrettable, that," Jafar said, dusting his hands off briskly, as if he had personally been the one to throw the pirate captain to his death. "Now, shall we get on with things, viz. my takeover of the British Empire, the permanent destruction of the Royal Society, and the fundamental alteration of the very rules of magic themselves? My, but it feels so good to finally say that aloud." He turned to Gold. "So, if you would be so kind, please tell us where the third bottle is hidden? The one you recovered from the City of Brass, the other two of which are in my possession? That one."

Gold's face contorted furiously as he fought to resist the command, but the dagger was still in Jafar's hand, and he had no choice. "I hid it There," he said at last. "In the world reached and passed through by the wardrobe network. Which you must have suspected, therefore why you wanted my wardrobe so much."

"I did. It is a terrible burden, being brilliant." Jafar shrugged modestly. "How clever of you, Robert. I mean, by your standards. So further enlighten us, which wardrobe did you conceal it in? Then I shall know where to start my search."

Gold once more did his damndest to hold back, but the compulsion again overwhelmed him. "Edinburgh. My alma mater, where I as a young student first made investigation into the tales of Scheherazade and the treasures fabled in the Thousand and One Nights. I could reasonably be assured that no one would look there, and indeed, no one ever did."

 _Edinburgh._ Emma still felt like mud, but at that, something finally dropped crystal-clear and horrifying into place. Lady Regina had gone to Edinburgh. That was where she had sent the message, warning her of Henry's plight and hoping Regina would speed to the rescue of their shared son, personal differences notwithstanding. Regina must have worked it out somehow, gone to get the bottle, trying to hold it over Gold's head – why? But now, if she was still there, if she had Henry with her, or even if she didn't – Jafar would arrive and take the bottle, kill her, leave Henry completely alone, Emma powerless to help him, Killian – God no, she wouldn't think about Killian – Elsa, Anna, and Robin still trapped in the pentagram, no way out –

"Edinburgh," Jafar repeated, looking very much like a cat whisker-deep in a dish of cream. "I see. You British have always been so eager to steal the treasures and legends of other peoples, to write patronizing histories of us _Orientals,_ to build museums to house all the spoils of your burglary – Ali Baba truly has nothing upon you, my lord. Well, this is one wrong that will be shortly set right. You shall accompany me to Scotland to ensure its recovery. Miss Swan here shall proceed to London, to attend to the small business left undone in the Abbey. As for these. . ." He eyed Elsa, Anna, and Robin thoughtfully. "I assume your blockade in Christiana harbor is still in place, Your Majesty? I'll be keeping your sister with me until you realize what good sense it is to take it down. But you won't be sending the aether to Britain. You'll select out the barrels of the finest quality for my personal use, and the rest will be destroyed. You see, alas, I am not content with merely taking down the head of the Royal Society. The rest of it must go as well, and I intend to ensure that no one in Europe will practice magic, unless by my personal word and warrant. Oh, there will be the odd savant or two, like you and Miss Swan, but not for much longer. And once I complete my studies into how to become one myself, with your kind assistance, there will be no magicians ever again. Apart from me, and I will be unstoppable."

Before anyone could utter a word, Jafar clicked his fingers, and the pentagram spat Anna out, landing her painfully at his feet. He clicked his fingers again, and glowing golden restraints spiraled up her body, rendering her immobile, as the golem stooped to pick her up. Elsa and Robin could do nothing more than stare at her helplessly, and Emma's mind had gone beyond fear or panic to utter, absolute blankness, a state of shock so profound that she almost felt calm. The only thing truly left in it was a dull, insistent knowledge, nearly a physical ache, that she had to go to Westminster, she had to do as Jafar had ordered, she had to undo the wards on the Chair and Stone. Had to.

Jafar pointed the black knife back at her and Gold, and both of them turned and began walking mechanically, like clockwork automatons, down the steps of the cathedral toward the waiting airship. As they ascended the ramp and into the luxurious interior, it was just possible to hear Jafar crisply instructing the pilot to fly first to London, whereupon they would divest themselves of the lady, and then continue on to Edinburgh. He settled himself magisterially upon a velvet settee, and was now in the process of pouring a sherry. "Drinks, my dear people?"

"I'll drink a toast over your dead body," Gold spat. "Nothing before."

"How rude." Jafar took a leisurely sip. "It is going to be an unpleasant journey for you, I was being quite generous by offering to ameliorate it. You see, Robert, I always like to investigate my foes thoroughly, so that by the time they even bestir themselves to fight me I am already prepared to hurt them the worst, and you, I am afraid, were a particularly fertile hunting ground. All those skeletons in your closet, it's a wonder you can even close the door. Murdered your wife after she ran off with the pirate – been searching for your son for ages, _n'est ce pas?_ Well, I suppose I can provide some small measure of closure for you at last. I, you see, have found him."

With that, he gestured languidly, and an iron cage that had not previously been in evidence materialized at the far end of the cabin. There was a man crouched inside, tattered and dirty, and as he lifted his head , Emma felt a jolt of lightning tear through her from head to heel. She felt strangled, powerless, disbelieving, until at last she croaked, "No. _Neal?"_

"Bae?" Gold said beside her at the same instant, sounding like he had been punched. _"Baelfire?"_

"What. . . he's. . ." Emma swung to stare at him. "He's _your_ son?"

"Emma?" Neal's blurry eyes sharpened as they struggled to focus on her. "Emma, what the hell are you doing here?"

"What the hell am _I_ doing?" The force of his betrayal burned through her anew, far more powerfully and painfully than the black magic. She felt seventeen years old again, when he had run and never returned, left her to give birth to Henry alone, in fear and pain, in a prison workhouse. "You. . . left me, you didn't. . . you never. . ."

"Bae," Gold said again, openly imploring. "Please. . ."

"Papa." Neal's voice was bitter. "I don't have anything to say to you."

Jafar, meanwhile, was watching this entire sordid tableau in utter glee. "Oh, so you _both_ know him? Would I be correct in presuming then, Miss Swan, that this is the father of your son?"

"I – son?" Neal looked ever more as if something heavy had been swung into his face. "I have a son?"

"No," Emma blurted, too fast. She felt as if she was completely shutting down on the spot, wanting nothing more than to withdraw into herself and go away forever. "No, you – "

"Son?" Gold interrupted, equally blindsided. "Henry – your boy – he's – ?"

"Your grandson, it would seem," Jafar completed lazily. "Well, I'm sure he'll be a comfort to you, in your grief. Though I'll have to deal with him as well, as I want no more scions of your legacy trotting around to complicate things for me. Mr. Cassidy, don't you have _anything_ to say to your beloved papa who has been searching for you so ardently, but would never give up his magic or anything else he valued to do so?"

Neal clutched the bars of his cage, gaze flicking back and forth between Gold and Emma. "I – " he started at last. "Papa, why would you even think – "

"I'm sorry!" Gold crawled across the floor toward the cage, reaching out with shaking hands to clasp his son's filthy ones, tears falling thick and fast on their interlocked fingers. "I'm sorry! Bae, I know I made so many mistakes, please – I can change, I can try again, I can be better – I'll find a way to free you, son, you can come home with me still – "

"You see," Jafar said, over the sound of his rival's soft, broken sobbing. "You might just choose to give up your power, your position, everything in the world that you cherished more than your own flesh and blood. Do it, Robert. Say that you resign, you abdicate, you utterly decry the Royal Society, and you can have your happy ending. I'll set Baelfire free, and you can be together at last."

Gold looked up at him wildly, still clutching Neal's hands, and even through her haze of stunned shock, despite everything, Emma felt a twinge of pity for him. After a moment, almost stammering, he said, "Very well. I resign as President of the Royal Society of English Magicians, effective immediately. I will make amends to everyone it, and I, wronged. I will do the right. . . the right thing."

"Papa?" Neal stared at him in disbelief, and a tiny, dawning shred of desperate hope. "Truly?"

"Yes, son." Gold was openly weeping again. "Yes, I will. I have to be worthy of you, Bae."

"Papa," Neal breathed again, his hand finally tightening in Gold's. They stared at each other for the longest moment, until at last his face crumpled, and he leaned forward, forehead resting against his father's through the cage. There was no sound except their muffled sobbing.

Jafar regarded them musingly for a long moment, then looked at Emma. "And what about you, my dear? Do you forgive him?"

Emma had no idea what to say. Part of her wanted to, very much. To shed that ghost, to be out from under its power – now that she was quite literally in Jafar's, she never wanted anything else to be able to control her again, and the weight of Neal's betrayal had rested on her shoulders like Atlas' burden for years. But how could she just give it up now? It was impossible, unthinkable.

"Emma?" Neal looked at her again, attention finally torn from Gold. His face was open, hopeful, imploring. "We. . . we can be a family. All of us. I'll never stop fighting for you, all right? For us and our – our son. I won't leave again. I didn't want to – I had to, I – "

"Neal. . ." She had no words. "Neal, I. . . after so long, I wished. . . I wished you were dead. I didn't want to see you. I didn't want to go through all this pain again. Now that you're back, I don't. . . I can't just. . . " Words seemed to have become impossible. "I love you. I probably always will. But to think that I could ever. . ."

In that moment, she could only recall how she had thought, so long ago, that she and Killian were alike - working for powerful, dangerous men in the futile hope that it would mend their broken hearts, when there were some wounds that magic could not heal, that not even time could, that were beyond all earthly power. Only she could have the strength to do it, and now, when she was a puppet, when she had no true volition of her own. . .

But Jafar was not pointing the knife at her. He was waiting, patiently and quietly. So in some sick, twisted way, this must be her choice after all.

"All right," Emma said, barely more than a whisper. "I forgive you, I suppose. But that doesn't take us back to the start. That doesn't change who we are now."

"Come on, Emma." Neal held out a hand to her. "Come, on, please. Just give me a chance."

She didn't move. Gold, meanwhile, turned a tearstained face to Jafar. "There. I kept my promise, I resigned, I did what you asked. Now set him free."

"Of course. How discourteous of me." Jafar rose to his feet and crossed the cabin like an elegant, stalking panther, coming to a halt before the cage. "And I, likewise, keep my promises."

Gazing down at Neal and Gold, he pulled out the black knife, then cut a sharp swath through the air. Something invisible flashed down and struck the iron bars with enough force to bend them nearly in half – and didn't stop. It raveled around Neal's throat, poured from his eyes and nose and mouth, throwing him into an uncontrollable fit of convulsions as it ripped him apart from the inside out. Emma and Gold must have made the same noise, but Jafar flicked the dagger at them, freezing them in place, as the destruction continued. Neal's limbs beat a frenetic tattoo on the floor, a gurgled whine emerging from his mouth as he fought in vain for breath, blood vessels bursting in his face as it purpled. His lips formed around a word as his hand clawed out for Gold's but could not catch it, a word that might have been _Papa._ Then it fell, and his head sagged back, empty eyes staring at nothing.

"There," Jafar said, viewing the results with a critically appraising air. "Set free, as requested, from the torment of ever again having to live with you and watch you break your promises. We all know you'd never truly give up your power for the sake of a loved one, Robert, and now you are spared from disgracing yourself trying. So you see, it's for your own good."

Gold did not move, did not speak, staring at the dead body of his son. He himself looked like a shell of a man, as if every remaining drop of defiance had been drained out of him. His hands fell from the bars of the cage. He was only capable of uttering one word, in a shattered whisper. _"No. No. No."_

"Yes, I am afraid." Jafar flicked the knife again, forcing Gold to his feet. "Now do come along. When we reach London, you have to tender your resignation from the Royal Society, and you shan't do it looking like a ragamuffin. You too, Miss Swan. Chop chop."

At that, Emma felt her numb legs pulled into motion, ordering her along without any input from her own brain, as she stumbled across the cabin behind Gold and Jafar. She did not look back, could not or would not, step by step by step, unthinking, unfeeling, until the door slammed shut behind her, she slid gently down the wall, and let the darkness take her.


	22. Chapter 22

From the moment the wardrobe door slammed shut behind him and he was plunged into complete, hellish darkness, Henry Mills had firmly convinced himself that nothing bad could happen if he just kept walking in a straight line. He could see eerie passages branching off, leading who-knew-where, and the faint shadows of looking-glass monsters darted out of sight no matter how quickly he turned his head, trying to catch them in the act. He didn't know where he was, and wondered if it was even somewhere, because the sense all around him was of a great and pressing _otherness,_ space that was not space, world that was not world, a doorway between waking and dreaming, true and false. Whatever place he had entered when he jumped into the wardrobe as the pirate had ordered, it was no ordinary refuge.

Henry's breath came fast even after he was sure he was not pursued, and his heart was pounding under his tweed school jacket. It was the only garment he had time to throw on in the heat of the confusion as the masked henchmen descended on Applewood Hall, as he hid through most of the chaos and finally emerged only to be forced to make a desperate run for it, and underneath he had on only his striped pyjamas and a pair of Sidney the butler's shoes that were much too large for him. Still, his school jacket did have his pocketknife, and it was with this weapon that Henry intended to make a stand, if such stand needed to be made, like King Leonidas of Sparta against the Persians at Thermopylae. His hand had gone numb with being clenched around it, but now at last, when it had been a good few hours (or something to that effect? – his sense of time having gone completely off the rails in here) without something leaping out to molest him, he no longer thought he was in danger of imminent and gruesome death, and instead was slowly realizing that he was utterly lost.

Henry came to a halt, weighing his options. The chamber where he stood soared high above him like the vaults of Westminster Abbey, which he had once seen a daguerrotype of, and the walls and columns were sculpted of some strange black stuff that gleamed with an oily sheen. When he touched it, he could feel faint vibrations and had the oddest sense that someone was talking, yelling for him on the far side, echoing away into nothingness. He jerked his hand away, but the whispers didn't stop. They spread out, rippling away down the endless mirrored warrens, bringing sounds back like the rushing of a tide, carrying secrets from the depths of the sea. Distant murmurs, and laughter, and screams.

Henry drew back from the direction from which the screaming was coming, unnerved. Now what did he do? It seemed as if more passages were sprouting into existence every instant, some lit with torches, some with fey glimmers, and some blacker than pitch. He definitely did not want to go down any of those, and as the black room continued to whirl and move as fluidly as deep water beneath broken ice, he wasn't entirely sure he knew which one he'd come from, either. Not as if he could return to Applewood Hall, and his only faint notion of a destination was the fact that his mother had said she was going to Edinburgh and would be back if all went well in only a few days. Going by his own experience, Henry was pretty sure that things hadn't. He was worried about her, but he was also not entirely sure that she had told him the truth. Why had she gone there, and for what? Was it to punish him for finding out about her vault, and for trying to bring his real mother there to set the sleeping people free? He loved Lady Regina, but he was increasingly sure that it hadn't been an accident at all, her conveniently appearing to take him at his birth and raise him as her own. Something about this went far deeper, and he was only beginning to riddle out what.

Henry revolved on the spot, telling himself that he had to be a hero now and as such, figure it out. He could hear wet, panting sounds from one of the many passages, scratching and clawing and whimpering, and they seemed to be coming closer. He didn't know if it was a real monster or just one of this strange place's tricks, but he wasn't terribly interested in finding out, even with pocketknife to hand. He chose another direction at random and flung himself down it.

After a few minutes of not-quite-running, the ground began to slope downward under his feet, and the tunnel opened up overhead, revealing an ink-black night sky devoid of stars, but scored with a thin white crescent moon, clothed in mist. Dead leaves scuffled around his feet, and he stepped out of the passage into thick, deserted woods. Tightly crowded pine trees bent and sighed in the cold wind, but most bizarrely of all, there was what appeared to be a lone train platform in front of him. Somewhere in the distance, a whistle sounded, long and low and eerie.

Unnerved, but resolved to face this predicament with the stiff upper lip and steely resolve of a proper British gentleman, Henry climbed the platform and waited. After several more minutes, the whistle sounded again, much closer, and he glanced over just in time to see the bronze-grilled locomotive emerging from the trees. Its headlight shone like a white, staring, cataract-blinded eye, and clouds of smoke huffed from its stack, but as it slowly rolled past him, Henry could see no shadow of an engineer, nor a coal-shoveling flunkey. It hissed and sighed wheezily to a stop, and the door of the first passenger car glided open.

Henry paused, then stepped inside, into a compartment that was not unlike the newfangled Pullman sleeper train car he had ridden with his mother when they had taken a holiday in France. Everything was lit dimly by blown-glass lamps, the siding and ceiling paneled in dark mahogany, and the berths upholstered in rather moth-eaten velvet. He perched gingerly on the edge of one of these, and the whistle sounded again as the train chuffed and creaked back into motion, rolling onward into the darkness.

Once more, he lost all sense of time or direction, sometimes hearing movement in the corridor outside and tensing himself for confrontation, but nothing actually entered his compartment. He tried peering out the window, but it was running in condensation and anything he could make out was just more trees. So he sat back and tried to look as if this was totally ordinary and he had every knowledge of where he was going. He wondered if he could make a ripping tale of it to his friends, but the schoolmaster at his Yorkshire parochial academy was a choleric stringbean who regarded imagination as the only thing worse than original thought, and would probably whale on him with the ruler if he caught him spreading stories.

Henry bit his lip, a touch of nervousness creeping in over his bravado, as the train finally squeaked and ground to a halt, and the door rolled open. He got up and ventured out onto another platform, descending the bare, rickety steps and trudging up a damp path toward a signpost that stretched out with one spectral, forbidding hand in a sole direction, up the hill. The weathered writing on the wood read simply, _The Dark Castle._

Right. Henry squared his shoulders, huffed out a breath, and began to climb, bushwhacking when the undergrowth became too thick, until he emerged on a vast lawn before a grand, sprawling stone estate with turrets and gates and cupolas, the exact sort of place you'd expect to find a reclusive sorcerer, or a man turned to a beast by a witch's spell, denned up away from the world until a beautiful young maiden came to free him. Henry didn't exactly fit the part, and nor did he particularly want to go inside, but he could still hear movements in the wood, and not far away, a wolf howling. So he hurried up the steps and to the great barred doors.

He knocked, waited with nervous glances over his shoulder, until they swung open with a creak and groan, revealing a high-ceilinged, shadowy front hall lined with unfriendly suits of armor. Henry stepped inside and shut the door, sliding the heavy bar in with a thunk, then started determinedly down the long carpeted corridor, sneezing every few steps at the dust his passing kicked up. He told himself that the suits of armor were not watching him pass, turning their helmeted heads ever so slightly, until he reached the end, passed through a set of smaller doors, and into another hall.

This one was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, but they were all covered in heavy brocade curtains that blocked any light, even if there had been any outside. The walls were done in some elaborate red-scrolled paper, and glass cases stood to either side of the room, populated with artifacts both exquisite and grotesque. There was a sword, three yellow ribbons on a pillow, an entire human hand, an old bronze urn, a knight's gauntlet, a spinning wheel threaded with gold, a cabinet of bottles and potions, a pair of silver slippers, and a shiny brass bottle – just to name a few. It was some demented collector's treasure trove, hidden here in the middle of literal nowhere, but as Henry stared further at the crest on the wall above the double doors, it began to make sense. For he recognized that symbol, had seen it stamped in sealing wax on letters, etched in public spaces, stamped on pins, embellished on pamphlets and broadsheets. The heraldry of the Royal Society of English Magicians, and of its president, Robert Malcolm Gold, Esq.

 _Is this his private castle? Hidden here in the netherworld the wardrobe leads into?_ Henry stood scratching his chin, trying to decide if his chances had just gotten much better or much worse. Maybe he could wait here until the magician returned, then work out a bargain for Gold to take him back to the real world, back to England. Lady Regina had money, surely she could pay if it was a reward Gold desired, but somehow Henry didn't think it would be that easy. If he promised he'd never tell anyone about this place, which he certainly wasn't supposed to have stumbled into, perhaps Gold would be inclined to have mercy. . .

At that moment, as he was still weighing up his options, he heard a crash of breaking glass from the front hall, followed by heavy, ominous-sounding thunks coming rapidly closer. With no time to contrive a better hiding place, Henry whirled around and dove behind the nearest plinth, the one with the brass bottle on it, and held very still, heart hammering, as someone or something pounded on the closed doors. At last with a groan and a crunch, they sagged open, and a tall silhouette loomed on the threshold. Not the slight, suited figure of Robert Gold, but a. . . pirate.

With no haste, the man sauntered into the room. He wore an elaborate old-fashioned red jacket with turned-up cuffs, a bandolier slung with a bristling array of pistols, and a privateer's black velvet hat with silver trim and a rakish raven's feather. His long hair was braided with small fuses, as were the tendrils of his black beard, and they were still smoking slightly, as if he had lit them afire not long ago. His broad-brimmed cavalier boots left trails of mud on the floor, and his dark-lined eyes avidly surveyed the treasures on display. He smashed one of the cases and removed an opulent necklace, pulled the gold thread off the wheel and coiled it up and was just about to leave with his haul when he turned abruptly, and Henry, who had inched out to watch him better, could not dive back in time. "You!"

Henry snatched the brass bottle and held it out in front of him, it being an item with which one could administer a significant whack. "Don't come any closer," he warned, as bravely as possible. "I'll – I'll fight you!"

The pirate smirked, resting a casual hand on the basket-handled scimitar swinging from his waist. "And do you really want to do that, boy?"

"I. . ." Henry hesitated. "No." His brain was racing furiously, trying to think if there was any way to convert this turn of fate into another escape. Maybe the pirates could take him with them, although they certainly would charge an eye-watering price for his safe return. Still, it was better than throwing himself on the dubious prospect of Robert Gold's mercy. "Who are you?"

"I'll be asking the questions, boy." The light blue eyes remained fixed on him, mocking, as the pirate held out a hand. "And as a matter of fact, you _will_ come here. Slowly."

Henry remained rooted to the spot, whereupon the pirate sighed, produced another pistol, cocked, and aimed it. "Do you think I could hit you clean between the eyes from here? I think so. If you want to find out, stay still."

Henry nearly did, but he wasn't about to test the captain's markmanship _or_ his sincerity, and still clutching the bottle, advanced across the floor. The pirate put the pistol back in his belt, grabbed him by the shoulder, and frog-marched him out the hall, where the presumed other members of his crew were busily robbing the Dark Castle of whatever they could get their hands on. Evidently they either did not know who it belonged to or feared no retribution from its owner, which struck Henry as strange. Looking down the long lawn, he could see an old-fashioned airship with tattered sails instead of a zeppelin hovering at the end, small figures swarming down its lines. Some of these ran past as the pirate dragged him closer, intent on the opportunity to pillage and plunder and paying no attention to them.

As the bow of the airship loomed overhead, Henry squinted at it, just able to make out the faded letters on its side. At first they made no sense – and then horribly, they did. For he'd heard ghost stories about it, and it seemed to prove beyond all doubt that wherever he was, it was not Great Britain circa the present day, 1851 A.D., but a different shadow world, a place between –

The pirate had been watching his face, seemed to follow every thought he'd had, and a ghoulish grin split his own. "Oh, aye," he said, making a sardonic, flourishing bow. "Once I had a ship of my own, a far better one, but the _Revenge_ was taken from me by the Royal Navy and its thrice-damned Society. So now I sail this one, for all time. Welcome aboard the _Flying Dutchman,_ young master. Captain Blackbeard, _a votre service."_

* * *

The instant the airship had vanished into the clouds, leaving the golem standing motionless sentinel with Anna in its grip, Elsa began to struggle as she had never before, ignoring the burning manacles of the pentagram, even as her flesh blackened with soot and char. Whimpering with pain, she nonetheless continued to force the edges out, further and further, until with a sudden flash of disintegrating magic and a clatter like breaking glass, they exploded. The pentagram abruptly contracted out of existence, and she and Robin ran.

Without Jafar around to command it, the golem remained placidly immobile, taking no notice of their escape, and Robin eyed it up and down, then pulled two arrows from his quiver and slammed them into its leg. Carving out just enough of a purchase on the rough, rocky clay, he used them to claw his way precariously up the golem's body, until he grabbed hold of the broad brim of its hand and swung himself over. He pulled his knife out of its sheath and began to saw at the golden bonds knotted around Anna, which knotted and writhed like cut snakes, hissing.

After one last glance to see that he had made it safely up, Elsa ran to the edge of the crag, thrust out her hands, and commanded an intricate ice staircase into existence, which she then clambered down as fast as she could, to the giant heap of snow at the bottom. "Come on, now," she muttered under her breath. "Come on. You're not dead too. You're _not._ Emma would kill me, anyway."

Elsa jumped off the ice staircase and into the narrow alley, where she began to dig out the snow on all fours. Soon enough her efforts revealed Killian Jones, fish-belly white and notably unconversational, but at least in one piece, which was far more than he otherwise would have been if she hadn't blasted him with her magic right as the golem threw him off. She brushed off the snow and shook him vigorously, until he groaned and a slit of blue showed under his ice-crusted lashes. "What the bloody. . .?"

"Wake up, Captain. Wake up. We have to go. Jafar has Emma, she's under his control with that black knife. He took her and Gold on the airship, likely to London, and – "

She needed to say no more. By the look on Jones' face, this news would have summoned him back from his deathbed, and he stumbled to his feet, shedding spare snowflakes. He then groaned and nearly buckled at the knees, but recovered apace and sprinted down the lane, her bumping and rattling in tow. "Wait! Robin and Anna, we have to – "

"Then _get_ them!" Killian barked, clearly unappreciative of being deterred in his quest, and Elsa blinked, then quickly conjured the ice staircase back into existence, scampered up it to the castle plaza, and found Robin just descending the golem with a woozy but otherwise all right Anna in tow. They jumped the last few feet to the ground and followed Elsa down to the street.

"Where are we going?" Anna panted. "Are we trying to rescue Emma? I mean, I think that's a wonderful idea and we totally should, but how are we getting there? Are we just leaving the golem behind? We can't let it stay here to come back whenever Jafar needs it!"

"You're welcome to stay if you want, Princess!" Killian never broke stride. "And whatever Jafar does with the golem will be a bloody drop in the bucket compared to what he'll do if he succeeds in what he wants with Emma!"

That effectively halted all discussion, and they kept running, until they reached the river quay where they had moored the _Revenge_. This time at least they didn't need to jailbreak it, and they leapt aboard and launched into the air with preparation so minimal that the thrusters were still getting warmed up as they soared skyward. Elsa stood in the bow, trying something novel – moving the clouds, tearing them, making them spill their snow at lower altitudes and breaking them up from the threatening towers so the _Revenge_ could achieve greater speed. Killian gunned it like a madman, at a speed she had never imagined an airship capable of, until at last, a small fast-moving speck on the horizon, they caught sight of their target.

"There!" Elsa yelled, trying the range with a shot of her magic, but she couldn't quite reach, and she had to take great care not to do anything to seriously compromise the Royal Society airship, not with Emma on board. "We're gaining!"

Killian didn't answer, continuing to wring every drop of speed from the shuddering, bucking _Revenge;_ having not flown in God knew how long, intended as a museum artifact only to commemorate Blackbeard's defeat, it was starting to lose steam. Meanwhile, their target had clearly noticed that they were being pursued, and began taking evasive action, dipping and weaving between the clouds. Then as they emerged from behind another one, the broadside of the Royal Society ship lit up with cannonfire, and Killian threw them sideways just as the shells screamed overhead. It was a masterly display of piloting, but none of them had the leisure to appreciate it, clinging onto ropes to avoid being pitched off into thin air. As the _Revenge_ righted, they pulled up nearly close enough for them to see into the windows of the other airship – Jafar standing in the cabin, waving at them cheerily, just as another volley went off.

There were moans and thumps as the _Revenge's_ oaken-beamed hull took the brunt of it, but the guns hadn't been loaded with a full charge of powder, and besides, this pirate ship was no shrinking violet. Killian accelerated it until it clunked and whined, trying to tangle their rigging into the other vessel's, but the nose dipped too soon, scraping alongside the siding and rolling away harmlessly. "Emma!" he bellowed. "EMMA!"

Elsa aimed a blast of ice into the engines of the other airship, but some invisible magical shield activated and repelled it in a blue flare. Then a moment later, the deck door swung open, and Jafar, black knife in hand, marched Gold – and Emma – out before him. "Please desist," he called, voice easily audible despite the roaring wind. "Otherwise this is going to get messy."

"Kil – " Emma caught sight of him, and her mouth dropped open, eyes naked with shock – and a sudden, terrible hope. "Killian!"

"I'm coming, Swan!" he bellowed back, throwing the full power of the failing engines into the next lunge, but the _Revenge_ swung dangerously, unbalanced, perilously close to falling out of the sky like a rock. He had to reroute all their power just to keep them airborne, starting to lag too far arrears of the other ship. "Hold on!"

Emma started to reach for him, as if their clasping fingers could span the gap of the storm-torn sky. Then Jafar interrupted, raising the black knife and uttering an imperious command.

Both Gold and Emma's faces twisted, as if they were doing all in their power to resist, and for once in his godforsaken life, Killian Bartholomew Jones found himself desperately hoping that Robert Gold would succeed at something. But naturally, he didn't. The President of the Royal Society raised his hands, Emma's fingers burned with an unearthly aethered halo, and Gold began to perform some complex incantation, channeling Emma's magic into him. Then the sky in front of them turned an odd, inverted black, if the fabric of the world had been unstitched and pulled inside out, and the next second, with no trace whatsoever, the Royal Society airship sailed into it and vanished from the face of the earth.

" _EMMA!"_ Killian's anguished bellow was the only sound in the suddenly stone-silent heavens. The _Revenge's_ engines were audibly whining and coughing as he drove it forward to the same spot where the other ship had disappeared, but of course there was nothing there now but drifting clouds. As he stared at the place where she had been, just a moment ago, before she was snatched out of existence by the perverse whims of a mad sorcerer, he had to fight a paralyzing flashback to Milah's death, to the look on Gold's face as he. . . no, _no,_ he was not going to lose Emma like this, even if this time around, Gold had had no choice in taking her from him.

"We're going down!" Robin bellowed, a mite unhelpfully considering that Killian himself was well aware of it. It was all he could do to keep the _Revenge_ on a more or less even keel as they lost thrust, until they finally circled and teetered and skimmed low atop a copse of thick Bavarian forest, then wobbled and plowed nose-first into the rich dark earth, taking out a few of said trees with them. The zeppelin tore open on the canopy, and gas hissed out as they slid and spun to a sputtering, groaning halt, coming to rest at last on their side, a slain giant in the woods.

"Bloody hell," Killian muttered, wiping the back of his hand across his filthy face. He was really running through airships at an alarming rate, as well as becoming far more acquainted with the practice of trying very hard not to die while crashing them than anyone cared for. "Everyone all right?"

Further groans and moans from his three passengers assured him that indeed, they more or less were, and Robin and Killian helped Elsa and Anna down from the tilted, splintered deck. They regarded the wreckage in grim contemplation, mist curling through the towering trees in spooky silence, until Elsa said suddenly, "Will. He's still in there. We can't leave him behind."

"Your Majesty – " Killian started exasperatedly, about to tell her that they didn't have time to lug Scarlet's clay arse around kingdom come, but then he realized that if he did, he would have no leg to stand on whatsoever in asking her to help rescue Emma. So the two of them crawled inside the skewed, crooked dimensions of the _Revenge,_ monkeying along floors that had previously been walls, until they reached the cabin where the mummified Will had been stored. Elsa carefully wet his wrappings again (about the only time a woman wanted a man to go soft, Killian considered cynically) and then they retraced the path out, their literally dead-weight burden slung between them. Panting, they emerged, dropped Will with a splat in the pine needles, and once more were faced with some way, any way, of getting out of their predicament.

"I don't suppose you can make us, I don't know, some bloody ice unicorns, can you?" Killian enquired of Elsa, who gave him a cold look in return. "Prance after them?"

"But where _did_ they go?" Anna interjected. "It was like they just. . . opened up a place between worlds, like it wasn't even a _real_ place. Just. . .the reverse side of reality, like – "

At this, Killian went quite still. "Bloody hell, Princess," he breathed. "You're a genius."

Anna looked bashful. "Well, I wouldn't say a _genius_ genius. I mean, I can be smart, but then I can also be, you know, not so smart, even when I probably should be. Not that I'm dumb, I definitely wouldn't say dumb, but really – "

"Shut up," Killian ordered, mind whirring furiously as he put the pieces together. Jafar must have commanded Gold to open a portal directly into the other world that was normally accessed through the wardrobe network, the unfathomable Place Between that he and Emma had paid a brief visit to during their escape from Monaco. So if they could just get to a wardrobe, they could follow them in. . . but seeing as they were standing in the middle of an ancient forest somewhere in Bavaria, their chances of accidentally stumbling across one seemed remote in the extreme. The _Revenge_ was clearly not in any shape to go any further, which meant they would have to walk. And even if so. . . where? Where?

Robin, Elsa, and Anna were watching him tensely, waiting for his command, and Killian realized, with a strange feeling in his gut, that they were genuinely following him as their captain, trusting that he would do the right thing and find a way out of this. It was not one he'd thought to find here, now, not with as bizarre a company as they were – and yet they were his, all of them, even Will bloody Scarlet currently masquerading as a particularly ugly statue. He had to – he had to think of something, an escape, another route –

And then, nearly from nowhere, a bolt from the blue, he had it.

* * *

Lady Regina Mills sighed with exasperation, shut the vault door, and straightened up, dusting off her hands and preparing to examine the next one. She flicked a small spell over her shoulder to ensure that the watchman remained flat on his face and indisposed to interfere; after all the trouble she had gone through to get into the University of Edinburgh's archives in the first place, she was _not_ having some pencil-pusher ruin it for her now. She had combed them one by one, but wherever Robert Gold had hidden the third djinni's bottle and his notes on the City of Brass, he had done so quite thoroughly. Regina didn't care so much about changing the laws of magic, although that _was_ a temptation, but rather for finding the bottle and holding it for ransom over Gold's head. If she had this in her grasp, he'd give her everything she wanted, everything she deserved. Change the rules at Oxford and Cambridge, admit her as a Fellow of the Royal Society if not something still greater, make the country bow before her talent and beauty. She'd have it all. Henry, her renown. . . and the curse kept whole, unbroken, as it should be for all time.

Regina snorted and proceeded to the next vault, working a quick magical combination on it. Just as it started to open, however, something hissed by her, and she whirled around in startled horror to see an arrow lodged in the low beam inches from her head. The source of it was a tall, sandy-haired, scruffy ne'er-do-well in a filthy green cloak and leather tabard, holding a longbow unerringly on her. "Step away from there, please, my lady."

"Put that thing down before someone gets hurt," Regina snapped back. "And by someone, I mean you."

He stared back at her just as belligerently, and she was about to fire something sharper when, of all the things, Captain Hook stepped into view behind the archer. He had with him two fair-haired young women, bedraggled and dirty-looking but still determined, and Regina stared blankly at the lot of them, trying but failing to make any sense of their appearance, before recovering her icy composure. "They don't let beggars and imbeciles into the University, I'm afraid. Go scrap for alms elsewhere."

"We need to talk to you, my lady." The archer did not lower his bow, or his gaze. "Now."

"Well then, you should stop pointing things at me, otherwise I might get the wrong impression. Who are you, anyway?" Regina scoffed. "The troll king of the tragic underworld?"

"Something to that effect." The archer shrugged. "Robin of Locksley at your service. Now, why don't you listen to what we have to say? It's about Henry."

Regina tensed. "Excuse me?" she breathed, low and deadly. "Who?"

"Henry." It was Captain Hook who spoke this time, damn his eyes. God, she _knew_ no good could ever come of allowing her son to drag him home with them like a piece of filth he'd found in the gutter. The pirate looked grim and colder than ever, downright dangerous. "There is a great deal of which you are evidently unaware, Lady Regina. The long and short of it is, Henry is in terrible danger, and a certain individual named Jafar, with Robert Gold and Emma Swan under his control, is closing in on the very item you are in search of. If he finds it, well. . ."

Regina felt the ground turn beneath her feet, but refused to show how much the bastard's words had rattled her – _if_ he was even telling the truth, which was somewhat less than likely. "And I should believe you why? How did you even get here?"

"If you must know, through the Irish Traveller network. My mother was one, and I've. . . kept in touch." Hook shrugged. "We walked to a market in Bavaria where they traded, caught a wagon, and made it here as fast as we could."

Regina eyed the lot of them with loathing, wanting nothing more than to fling a curse and be gone in a puff of smoke, but the mention of Henry stayed her hand. "And I suppose it's too much to ask what you were doing in Bavaria?"

"Actually, Prague, trying to fight a golem." Hook's blue eyes darkened almost to black as he regarded her with the same uttermost disdain she was pouring on him. "Now, would you like to know what I had for breakfast last Thursday, or do you think you might assist?"

Regina didn't move. "And how did you put my son in danger, exactly?"

"Me? You were the one who left him behind and ran off to Edinburgh in pursuit of your own selfish ambition!" Hook shouted. "Maybe if you'd been there, he – "

Regina opened her mouth in outrage, about to inform him that he was the very last individual in the entire universe who had any moral standing to castigate anyone else for acting out of selfish ambition, when the thrice-damned archer – Robin – intervened. "We've no time for the two of you to stand trading insults about who's been more of a villain," he ordered brusquely. "My lady, can you take us to your home – Applewood Hall, I believe it is called – and thus allow us to access the wardrobe? Jafar, Gold, Emma, and quite possibly Henry are in the shadow world."

Regina blew out a grampus breath through her nose, fingers still itching to curse them, but trapped in the awful, dawning awareness that they might be right. "And you said that this – bottle – is there too?"

"Aye. Gold said he hid it there. It's what Jafar is after. On no account can he be allowed to find it."

Regina was silent for a moment more, mulishly chewing this over. Then she said, "Fine. I'll help you. Only if you promise that after this, I'll never see any of you wretched mouth-breathers again. You do not interfere in my affairs, you leave Henry to me, and you don't stand in the way of me getting what I deserve. Otherwise, you _will_ regret it."

"If we can get Henry back alive, we'll see who he trusts with his safety," Hook growled. "And trust me, I never want to see you again either. Now?"

"We don't need to go all the way back to Yorkshire," Regina informed them, picking up her ruffled skirts and stepping neatly over the body of the watchman, then starting up the steps. "Come on."

Robin, Hook, and the two women followed her in utmost skepticism as they climbed out of the University archives, up into the sedate halls, and then out onto the steep, slippery cobbles of the Royal Mile. It was raining like the dickens, a totally common state of affairs for Scotland in late autumn, and the mist was so thick that they had to stay close together, or else risk losing each other even at a distance of a few paces. Navigating by the streetlamps and here and there the odd bit of landmark glimpsed in the fog, Regina descended cautiously – nearly lost her footing once, and shot Robin an icy stare when he grabbed her by the elbow, steadying her. He just gave her a little flourishing bow, which was even more annoying, and proceeded alongside as if he had every right to be there.

Ignoring him as best she could, Regina finally drew up short in front of the World's End tavern, hearing her unwanted companions draw in their breath behind her. It was Hook who finally spoke. "The door in the back," he said, "the one that's never been opened, that's rumored to lead into the Seelie Court. That's where we're going, isn't it?"

"If it's never been opened," Robin murmured, "what happens when we do?"

"That is none of your concern, thief," Regina said icily, forcing back a brief pang of her own nerves. Without another word, she jerked open the low-linteled front door and led them inside, the patrons briefly falling silent in their conversations and turning to stare at them as the odd company passed. They ducked into the narrow, dark hallway beyond, down the stairs, Regina having to grope with her hands in the blackness and finally conjuring a small blue ball of witchlight to help them see – but it was snuffed out at once, as if someone or something had blown it out. It was only by the faintest scraps of light that they fetched up in front of the door.

Regina studied it for a long moment, not at all eager for what she had to do. But, she reminded herself, the sooner it was over, the sooner she would have her son, and be rid of these idiots forever. So she stepped forward, taking a deep breath and preparing to force it open, feeling something straining in her chest as she did, the same force that had opposed her using the witchlight. Her hands sparked and fizzed, but the magic lapped out on the dark, scarred wood without effect.

"Come on, my lady," Robin said softly. "Do it. You have to. You _can."_

"I don't need your help," Regina huffed, but knowing that at least one person in here believed in her was oddly comforting, and her second attempt burned forth more strongly, wavering and flickering but not going out – until at last, the latch gave with a creak of ancient iron, and the door swung open into a blackness so absolute that even the memory of light was hard to recall. A cold wind blew through, smelling of pine and earth and wet, and as their eyes adjusted, peering into the other world before them, they could just make out the silhouette of high towers, rambling walls, far in the distance. A fortress in the forest, high and remote, fey and fearsome.

"So, the Seelie Court," Hook commented. "Is that where we are?"

"No," Regina muttered. "The Dark Castle. Anyone wants to turn back, now is your chance."

She was hoping they would, leave her to it, but none of them did. Not Robin, not the pirate, not the two girls. And so, after a moment more, they stepped over the threshold, one by one, out of Edinburgh, out of Earth altogether, and into the wild.


	23. Chapter 23

The airship swayed and shook and almost burst, timbers straining, lamps sputtering, and fittings springing from the buckling walls as the maw of the shadow world gaped wide to gulp them down. They rode roughshod into a sparkling, streaked abyss of darkness, weird and wild coruscations of magic burning up in short-lived flares outside the portholes, dust falling from the ceiling and the stink of gas starting to permeate the dim cabin. Yet as the world quite literally came apart at the seams, Jafar could not appear to care less. He lounged on the velvet settee, waving a bored hand to prevent himself from toppling off as the airship continued to perform a series of increasingly tortured gyrations, then reached into his breast pocket, removed a fat cigarillo, lit it from one of the broken sconces, and blew an utterly insouciant puff. Something exploded. He shrugged, then did it again, causing a second crisis. "My dear people, where on _earth_ is your sense of fun?"

Neither Gold nor Emma made any move to answer, for obvious reasons. The airship hit something invisible and solid, which staved the beams in, and it was possible to hear cold air whistling through the cracks – at least until Jafar repaired it with another wave of the hand and a martyred sigh, as if in disbelief that a sorcerer of his caliber should be called upon to perform the duties of a common longshoreman. It groaned and sparked ominously, but held, and a few moments, the worst of the unearthly howling ceased. They soared through into a silent black sky, upturned over the world (what world?) like the solid carapace of some great shelled insect, unalleviated by stars or moon or any other familiar celestial object. Below there was some city vaguely similar to London: cluttered steeples and narrow wynds, medieval towers and marble palazzos, treed parks and broad carriageways, but all of it was only discernible in faint silhouette and shadow. It too had that same quality as the sky, that compete, unnerving lack of light, so complete that not even the word "darkness" seemed sufficient to describe it.

Briefly, numbly, Emma wondered where the pilot was going to set down, but glancing through the length of the interior, with its broken doors and pulverized glass, she could see or hear no sign of life from the cockpit. Of course he was dead, probably had been dead from the moment Jafar had helped himself to command of the Royal Society airship. She couldn't think about that, or Neal, or the heart-stopping glimpse she'd had of Hook, flying the _Revenge_ like hell and fury in a futile attempt to catch them. He wasn't dead, the golem hadn't killed him, but what did that matter? They were still going to die, and probably in some far more gruesome and inventive fashion. He'd realize this. Cut his losses. Try to save whatever he could, his skin or otherwise. No one in their right mind would follow her, or anyone, into a place like this.

Emma watched, feeling a certain remote remove from the situation, as Jafar directed their descent with the grace and elegance of an orchestra conductor, bringing them into land in a broad plaza, forbidding columned buildings looming to every side. There was a horrendous scrape and crunch and grate as the belly of the airship skidded along the stones, but it finally arrived at a halt without further calamity, and fell silent like some mortally wounded beast, giving into the peace of death at last. A morbid thought, perhaps, but she had a feeling this was only getting started.

Jafar tripped the lever that extended the gangway, then languidly rose to his feet and brandished the black knife. "Miss Swan, President – oh no, it _isn't_ President anymore, is it? – Gold, come with me."

Having no choice, Emma and Gold trudged after him like badly cranked automatons, out into the cold black fog of the shadow city and toward the massive edifice ahead – like Buckingham Palace, if Buckingham Palace was built in this fey not-London on the other side of the wardrobe, fallen through the looking glass. The heavy gilded doors swung silently open at their approach, and Emma was forcibly reminded of how the royal palace in Norway had looked when she and Kristoff cadged their way in: deserted, desolate, windows shattered and snow sifting on the floor. Their breath showed in silver plumes, their feet left imprints in the heavy dust. She had never seen a more alien, abandoned place, such a haunt of fallen, crumbled glory. She could not entirely shake the sensation that she had been here before.

Jafar, for his part, appeared at no leisure for chitchat, steering them brusquely across the cavernous front foyer, cracked chandeliers dangling rakishly high above, and into a smaller retiring room on the far side. He clicked his fingers, causing a fire to spring up in the ashy remnants of the hearth, and the sudden light and glow made Emma grimace. A moth-eaten carpet rolled itself aside at a further gesture from Jafar, revealing an intricately chalked pentagram on the floor beneath, similar to the kind that had trapped them in Prague. Emma stared at it, pieces and fragments of revelations colliding in her head – but nothing she could pin down, nothing that made any sense. But this – what was this – she didn't –

"Stop," Jafar ordered, and Emma and Gold came to precise halts on a shilling. "Now look around. Particularly you, Miss Swan. What are your. . . impressions of the place?"

"It's very. . . " Her tongue felt thick and clumsy. "Empty. Cold. Dark. Broken."

"We are all envious of your keen observatory skills, my dear." Jafar made a mocking bow. "Though at no call to dispute your conclusions. It wasn't always like this, you know. At one time, the world on the other side of the wardrobe network – the world we are presently in, in case that was not sufficiently obvious for the slower among us – was a beautiful place. Full of life, of magic, of vitality and promise. This city was as great as London, with none of London's filth, stink, disease, poverty. But then, well. A power-mad magician, a vengeful queen, an infernal bargain, and a curse more terrible than anything even the Royal Society, in all their depravity, would sanction. Shall I continue the tale from here, Robert, or shall you?"

Gold jerked. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Lies." Jafar sighed. "Well, we shall attend to the more regrettable failings of your character in a minute, after Miss Swan fully understands why I brought you here. Anyway, my dear. As I was saying. Do you know what happened to this land's rightful rulers, the prince and princess supposed to bring back its beauty and vitality after its long neglect under an evil queen? Do you know who their daughter was, perchance, and why she could never be allowed to know who she was or what she could do? Do you know the depths of the power she could achieve, if she realized this at last?"

His words hit Emma almost slowly, one after another, like a drunken boxer's punches. She couldn't breathe for an eternal moment, wanted to tell him he was lying. But he wasn't; she could feel it down to every sinew of her, as the full magnitude of what he was saying became clear. "Me," she said. "You think I'm the daughter. That I was born here, that my parents – that they're – "

"Asleep in Lady Regina's enchanted vault, yes," Jafar completed smoothly. "Just as your boy claimed, no matter how disinclined you were to believe him, and she, by the by, is no lady. Well, she is, but more than that. She is the queen who cast the curse to bring your parents, most of their subjects, and anyone else she fancied to the other side of the wardrobe, to England. You escaped, amusingly enough, in the same way. You were also placed in a wardrobe and sent away, just ahead of the curse. Because, one day, you were supposed to break it, and save them all. Which you have heretofore failed at doing, I notice."

"Regina is. . . _Regina_ is. . . ?" Emma was stunned. She'd never been overly close with her son's adopted mother, but had tolerated her well enough, trusted in their common interest in Henry's safety. "But why would. . . why would she. . . ?"

"Oh, we're just getting to that part." Jafar's black eyes sparkled with malice. "Once upon a time, there was a horrible magician whose son, for perfectly understandable reasons, had run away from home. All the magician's efforts could not find him, and so, the magician decided he must have more power. Everything in England and Europe had failed him. So he must go here, to the world that lay just beyond his own, and which, until now, had coexisted rather peacefully with it. Must gather up all its magic and give himself access to it – perhaps for his son, perhaps merely because he was a filthy greedy arse, it is so difficult to tell. That what why he created the curse that would accomplish what he wished, and manipulated the queen into casting it. Have you any idea who this miscreant might be?"

Emma remained motionless an instant longer, before her head snapped up, and her eyes transfixed on Gold's. "You. It was you. Wasn't it."

"Excellent deduction, Miss Swan." Jafar applauded. "You are correct. Can you furtherly guess why this magician might be so obsessed with stamping out any and all access back to this realm, and the threat that it would grow strong again, reveal what he had done? Do you see where this obsession might particularly be located?"

It was there, clear and terrible. "The Night Market. The Night Market has been here all along. That's what the black keys are – they open portals here, into this world. It's a bridge between here and England, full of this world's magicians, this world's power, that Gold tried to stamp out. That's why he wanted it gone so much."

" _Exactamundo."_ Jafar grinned. "Indeed for many centuries, the Night Market was how magicians from both sides met and exchanged ideas and techniques and discoveries – and of course, plots for rebelling against their magic-hating rulers, almost none of which ever worked. Yet then came the Renaissance, and the discovery of aether, and the governments of Europe whole-heartedly adopted the power they used to fear and loathe. That was when the Night Market began to evolve to its present function – the underground, the untrained, the unwanted, who nonetheless were fiercely proud of their independence and their power. It was the only reason that this world was not invaded and overtaken by Great Britain at the height of its colonial zealotry, for it fought the good fight until even that rapacious monster decided it not worth the trouble. After that, it had the good sense to lie low. But if it rose again, if it took back its power, if this world could stand as a rival to the Royal Society, to Great Britain, to no-longer-President Gold. . . far too dangerous. And so, it must be obliterated."

Emma was speechless. She had known that Gold's hatred of the Night Market contained both personal and political dimensions, but she had never, of course, imagined that it ran this deep. That he had stolen all the power from this world, created a curse, gotten Regina to cast it, left this place – her home, if this entire fable was true – in shadowed, shattered ruins. _My family._ Henry had said they were all asleep in Regina's vault. Her parents were supposed to rule this world, to restore it to its former glory, to make its magic and its might grow strong again. . . . but they couldn't. Not where they were. Not unless she believed. Unless she freed them. But if she did it under Jafar's influence, knowing what he wanted. . .

She could not face it, could not process the utter, thundering betrayal running through her. _Neal, it was Neal, Gold's son, the one who ran away, the one he did all this for – who left me too, then Jafar found him, killed him_. She could still see Neal's bulging eyes, purpling face, desperate struggle as Jafar coolly murdered him with the black knife. Didn't even know if she felt grief or a soul-deep, impossible rage. This was too much to take in, too much, even as she had the oddest sensation that she had known it all along. Magic burned through her, exploded from her fingers in shocking gusts, leaving black scorch marks on the floor. With a cool, detached reason far away from her increasing maelstrom, she realized that she was losing control completely.

"Good." Jafar eyed her appraisingly. "That pain you feel? That fury? That realization that you grew up alone, an unwanted orphan in a world not your own, because of the greed and mendacity of this one man? Hold onto that, my dear, we shall need it very shortly." With that, he turned to Gold. "You said that the third bottle to complete the set from the City of Brass was hidden in this world. In your Dark Castle, I presume? Horribly unimaginative name, but we can't expect much from you. Now you will perform the necessary magic to bring it here."

Gold's face twisted alarmingly, a vein pulsing in his temple. "Oh, I will?"

"Indeed," Jafar said pleasantly, flicking the black knife. "Please don't waste our time by resisting, Robert. It's only going to make it hurt. Now, if you'd be so very kind."

Still Gold fought the inexorable pull, until blood vessels burst in his eyes and his skin turned almost to scales, until he looked lizardlike, demonic. But for all his power, he could not resist the command, and his hands began to move in short, stilted gestures. He uttered words in some ancient tongue that made the hair on Emma's neck stand up, and a flash of aether emanated in golden glow from his fingers. All three of them tensely awaited the materialization of the aforesaid bottle – and waited. The circle of runes remained empty. Nothing happened.

"What are you doing?" Jafar inquired, with a sleek, lethal edge. "Not trying to fool me, I hope?"

"I tried to summon it from the castle," Gold snapped. "It didn't work."

"Try again. Harder. Your failure could have unpleasant consequences, especially for that little maid of yours, Belle. To be honest, I have no idea what she sees in you, and one day she'll wake up and realize it. But until then – "

"I can't! It's gone!"

Jafar raised one eyebrow. "Robbed?"

"No one can even get into that place, much less touch the artifacts, unless they are my blood." Gold's lips peeled back over his teeth. "And seeing that you just ensured I have no descendants left – "

"Oh," Jafar said. "But you do. Miss Swan, can you please enlighten our mutual friend in his confusion?"

The words took a long moment to pierce the thick red veil of rage that enveloped Emma, almost seemed unimportant. But then they crystallized into horrible, gut-wrenching sense. _"Henry."_

"Indeed." Jafar grinned, then turned back to Gold. "Seeing as we have just divined that he is, in fact, your grandson, it seems to serve as proof positive that he has ended up on this side of the wardrobe as well. Stumbled into your castle, perhaps – took the first thing he saw to hand – and at the same time, inadvertently broke your protection spells. Who knows what sort of unsavory characters could have followed him in, stripped it from floor to ceiling? All your magical artifacts gone, all those decades of meticulous murder and extortion wasted?" He clicked his tongue. "What a pity."

Gold opened his mouth, then shut it. He appeared utterly at a loss for words or sense, nothing except the burgeoning madness in his inhuman eyes. "I'll kill you." It wasn't clear if it was directed to Jafar, to Emma, to both, or everyone else on the face of the earth, this world and that one. _"I'll kill you."_

"That, my dear fellow, is like a dog on a leash threatening to piss on his master," Jafar said laconically. "And you surely must know what one does with disobedient animals. You should, Robert; you've spent enough time crafting Great Britain's policy toward those not fortunate enough to be wealthy, white, and of the masculine persuasion. And so. . . "

He shrugged, flipped the sleeves of his cloak back over his hands, and clicked his fingers. Leather straps sprang out of nowhere and raveled up Gold from head to toe, binding him immovably in place, and there was a clang of metal as a cage followed it, forcing him onto all fours. Emma watched him unblinking, feeling as if she too was about to fly apart like the airship, cascade into a thousand pieces. Stronger. She was stronger. The magic still pulsing out of her had become steel, sharp edges, cold and keen as ice. It felt as if a great blindfold had been lifted from her eyes, a curtain pulled up on the truth of things. She stayed where she was, making no move to intervene, to turn away.

"Come, my dear." Jafar held out a hand to her. "We have so much to accomplish, don't you remember? This creature will suffer his proper fate in time, but not if you don't help me. You want it, don't you? Revenge. Well, I assure you. You shall have it. He only played at making you into the Black Swan. I will bring truth to that. It has been so long coming."

Emma didn't move a moment longer. Then she looked up slowly, and was distantly gratified to catch a brief glimpse of herself in the old mirror on the desktop. Her eyes looked nearly as strange as Gold's, flat and red, mesmerizing, dangerous. As if she had finally understood the truth of the power she had been born to, as if she could control it, master it after all. No more running. No more orphan girl. Nothing.

Without another word, she turned her back on Gold. Crossed the floor to Jafar, and took his hand.

* * *

The door from the World's End hammered shut behind them, and they were well and truly in the shadow world. Killian Jones' first impression of this fey and fearsome place was that it was as cold as a witch's tit, an observation he had no wish to empirically confirm; Lady Regina was right next to him and that woman got on his bloody nerves. He had already determined to keep a close eye on her, at least within the bounds of their mission to save Henry, and as their strange confederation – himself, her, Robin, Anna, and Elsa, the earthly remnants of Will Scarlet left at a sleazy boardinghouse in Edinburgh where a clay mummy would be among the more unremarkable items stacked in the cellar – processed further along the path, he kept one hand on his sword. He did not put it at all past her to lead them straight into a trap, and continue on her merry way without a glossy black hair turned.

At the precise moment, however, Lady Regina did not appear to have such a nefarious agenda in mind – yet. She had kindled a fireball in one hand to light their way, and despite frequent loathing glances suggesting that she would like nothing more than to incinerate the lot of them, she had nobly refrained. Apparently also to ascertain her good behavior, Robin had cozied up right alongside – in Killian's opinion, somewhat closer than decorum called for. He knew why, though. It had been obvious from the start that there was a spark of something between the lady and the outlaw, which might make Regina hesitate in said incineration long enough for Killian to get the girls away. But he wasn't leaving here. Not without Emma.

To distract himself, Killian focused on their rapidly approaching objective: the Dark Castle, just visible among the heavy trees. He had heard rumors of this place, Gold's personal fortress containing his storied stash of dangerous and magical items, but had given up on it truly existing after scouring London, England, and all of Europe high and low, with no success. _I never knew about this damned world, though, so that explains it._ He already didn't care for it. Not when –

At that moment, something streaked across the horizon in a blur, lower at first but swiftly gaining altitude, and Killian, the first to see it, instantly recognized it for what it was. Risking swift death by fireball or withering scorn alike, he grabbed Regina's sleeve. "Bloody hell, that's an airship! Jafar flew Gold and Emma into this godawful place on one, we need to chase and – "

Regina shook him off. "I don't recall that I came here on behalf of either one of them. I came here for _Henry._ And if you think I'm going to stick my neck out for – "

"Aye, if you think you'll get Henry back and tell him you let his mum get roasted without a blink – you've got another bloody one coming!" Killian was already starting to run, pelting down the path even as he knew in despair they were too late, they'd never reach it in time. He could hear the deep thrum of its engines as the airship climbed – could see lights flickering in the gunwales – still just barely away, just close enough that one titanic shot might reach – no chance, no choice, if Emma was aboard, he had to. _"ROBIN!"_

The leader of the Merry Men sprinted by him, gained the hilltop, nocked an arrow to his longbow, drew back so far that the wood creaked, and loosed. There was another moment in which nobody breathed, certainly not Killian, and then the arrow struck soundly aft, directly in the unprotected crevice between burner and thruster. It hissed, spraying a violent trail of sparks as the gas ignited, and fire ate up the silk. Shouts and bellows echoed from the airship as it swung and juddered around, tilting precipitously, and in the glow, Killian made out the name etched ornately on the stern. _Flying Dutchman._

A sensation went through him as if he had been the one hit by the arrow, until the tumult briefly seemed to fade to white noise. Christ, how was this even _possible?_ His brain reeled, frantically rejecting the impossible. No – years ago, decades, when his no-good father fled –

Reality snapped back in a thunder, as he kept running and dark figures scuttled on the deck of the burning airship, extinguishing the flames with a rudimentary bucket brigade. A voice bellowed commands, and the helmsman guided their faltering course around into a sharp turn. Killian had barely a moment to register that this meant the bow chasers were now pointing directly at them, a realization that was helpfully furthered by all of them opening up at once, a deafening cacophony of blasts that plowed furrows in the thick turf of the lawn. Killian threw himself sideways, covering the nearest fleeing figure with his body, and discovered it was Princess Anna when a muffled voice said beneath him, "I don't think they're very happy."

"You think?" He rolled off her, pulled her upright as she brushed the grass from her skirts, and then shoved her behind him as the _Dutchman_ came in for an only slightly unsteady landing. Then the ramp yawned open as if to admit the entrance of Lucifer from the pit of hell (not that Killian was being overly dramatic, not in the least) and a tall figure strode out, pistol clapped to the head of a smaller, struggling figure. Killian's dazed eyes took a moment to adjust – and then his heart stopped.

"Good evening, my friends," the pirate captain called, beaming magnanimously at them and ignoring Regina's horrified hiss and Killian's curse alike. "I am sure you didn't _mean_ to damage my ship, didn't you? That would just be inconsiderate."

"Who the hell are you?" Killian's horror was fading, replaced by rage. "Let the lad go, or I swear, there will be nothing to compare to what I'll – "

"You'll slip and fall on your arse? Or bat your lashes at me and swoon?" The pirate laughed. "Oh yes, I know who you are. Even here, we hear things, and there's plenty of tale that Captain Hook has gone soft. Which I see is true." He cocked his head, appraising. "Davy's boy, aren't you? You have the look of him, especially in the weak chin and the faint whiff of self-serving cowardice. I've dealt with plenty like you. You'll just be the next."

Killian's spine snapped straight, due more to the slander on his magnificently chiseled jawline than anything else. "Davy Jones was my father, yes," he snapped. "Only in the barest sense of the word. And this is – was – his ship, at least before you apparently killed him and took it. So I'm afraid it actually belongs to me."

"I disagree. And more pertinently, so does my friend, the pistol." The pirate twisted it into Henry's jaw, eliciting a whimper from the boy and an attempted lunge from Regina, restrained only by Robin's arm. "For the benefit of the company, and since you don't seem to know just who you're dealing with, a formal introduction. Captain Blackbeard, at your service. Charmed, ladies." He waved jauntily at Elsa and Anna, then turned back to Killian. "Now, what are you going to do?"

" _Blackbeard?"_ Killian stared at him. "Bloody hell, you're dead. You died over a hundred years ago, off the coast of North Carolina. Some Royal Navy toff dueled you to the death, it's said they hacked off your head and your body swam circles around the ship trying to get it back on." That part might be fiction, but he was not inclined to doubt much further. "What did you – "

"Fell down a portal." Blackbeard shrugged. "Wound up here, where time doesn't work the same way. Do you happen to know what became of my ship? _Queen Anne's Revenge,_ that would be. I was quite fond of her, you know."

"No bloody idea."

"Pity." The pirate cocked the pistol. "Then we don't have any ground to make a bargain, and so I can rid us of this encumbrance with no – "

"No! Christ!" Killian jerked forward, and Blackbeard lowered the gun slightly, with a mocking grin at how he had given himself away. "Just. . . don't hurt the boy. We can hash out the rest of it in a bit, but. . . don't." He sucked in a nauseous breath. "I'll tell you where your ship is, even."

"Oh?"

"Aye. I crashed it in some bloody Bavarian forest, and if you can put it back together, you're welcome to it. Scare the shite out of the entire British empire to know you'd returned, for sure." Killian was not entirely sure that loosing this lunatic upon the unsuspecting populace was the wisest thing to do, but it would keep the Royal Society distracted nicely, and he was prepared to do far worse to get to Emma in time. "Deal, mate?"

Blackbeard scowled. "You _crashed_ it?"

"Unavoidable circumstances. You know, pirate to pirate. . . bit of trouble with the law, eh? Come on, bloody hell, just – "

"And how am I supposed to get to Bavaria in the first place?" Blackbeard gave him a cold fish-eye. "I smell a rat."

"I'll supply you with a transport spell, and a lodestone to put it back together. A damn pair of dice to hang over the wheel, if you want." Regina spoke for the first time, her voice sounding rusty. "Just give me my son back."

Blackbeard surveyed her up and down, affecting an expression of obnoxiously fake sympathy. But evidently the promise of having his own vessel back under his command, and the chance to exact revenge on the Royal Navy that had so unsportingly put him out of business a century ago, was too tantalizing to resist. "Deal," he said, spun Henry around and shoved him hard in the back, as the boy stumbled across the lawn to the nearest friendly face – which happened to be Robin, catching him and shielding him with instinctive paternal protectiveness. "Now hand it over."

Regina hesitated, but conjured a scroll from the air, furled it around a small dark stone, and tossed it loathingly to the pirate, who grinned. He turned and waved at his crew, watching from the deck of the _Dutchman,_ beckoning them to join him. A few moments later, a long line of outrageous scoundrels clanked toward their captain, bristling with weapons of every imaginable description and smelling even more picturesque. Blackbeard ceremoniously unrolled the scroll, blew on it – squid ink, a valuable magical commodity if you could get it – remarked, "That's what you call a _squiddy_ situation!" and an instant later, the lot of them vanished into thin air.

Everyone remained where they were, staring suspiciously in case the pirate crew suddenly reappeared, but after several seconds proved that the only thing left of them was the smell, Killian glanced at Regina. "Where'd you really send them, my lady?" he asked. "The Bastille?"

Regina glared at him. "Unless that's where you crashed his ship, no. He gave back Henry, so I sent him where he wanted to go. Let him entertain the Royal Society for a while, I imagine we both won't mind. Now, are you going to get on that ship and fly off to rescue your fair maiden or not? Fair warning though, Captain. She's not the kind of woman in the habit of loving anyone. She'll shut you out and shut you down, and you'll have nothing left for your efforts but a freshly and savagely broken heart. Your choice."

"Thank you for that wise counsel." Killian broke into a trot, loping toward the _Dutchman,_ as Elsa and Anna ran to keep up. "Don't trouble yourself on our account."

"Wait," Henry's voice said behind them, rattled but not permanently harmed by his too-close encounter with a legendary pirate. "Are you going to find my mum?"

"They're going to find Emma, yes," Regina said coldly. "I have my doubts about whether that woman should really be called your mother."

"She's more my mother than _you_ are!" Henry pulled away from Robin and sprinted toward the gangplank. "I'm coming!"

"Henry!" Regina screamed. "Henry Daniel Mills, you are _not –_ "

Her motherly admonitions went for naught, as Henry squirted past Killian and beetled into the depths of the ship. Glancing over his shoulder, Killian saw Robin pause, then shrug, beckon to Regina, and start after them. "It seems we're all going after all."

Regina, fuming, nonetheless could not seem to find the proper words to scathingly blow him off, and instead had to submit to the gross indignity of being towed up the ramp after them. "Let go of me," she huffed, once she and Robin had reached the top. "I can't believe you."

"I'm having trouble believing you as well," he remarked, then jogged to catch up to Killian, who had been watching the scene with poorly disguised amusement. "Where do you think she went?"

"Emma?" Killian looked back at Regina. "Locate away, my lady."

Regina opened her mouth, looked at Robin, emitted another huff, rolled her eyes viciously, then, finding no alternative, held out her hand. "I dread to ask if you have something of hers?"

"No. Get around that."

Muttering a constant stream of unfavorable epithets under her breath, Regina worked carefully at the threads of magic until it flared unsteadily, coalesced into a blue fist-sized aureole, and flew off as Killian ran to keep up with it – reaching the wheel, hauling the _Dutchman_ into motion, and taking time for a brief and heartfelt prayer that he didn't bloody crash this one too. Then, preliminaries attended to, he blasted off like a bat out of hell.

They flew hard for – Blackbeard was right, time was strange here, liquid, intangible, but perhaps a few hours, perhaps longer – following the steady gleam of the tracking spell, until it abruptly veered, dipped, and dove down into a strange black city, a deserted, wraithlike maze of empty buildings. Killian, far from a poor judge of character or a dull observer, noticed Regina's lips turning whiter, her eyes turning blacker as they descended, until he decided that he would do very well indeed to watch her like a hawk. Whatever this was, _wherever,_ she both knew it and was far from thrilled to see it again, and he, having had personal experience of the sleeping people in her vault, knew just what she was capable of if she took it into her head to be vengeful. _What did she do here? Why?_

This question, however, was going to have to go unanswered for the time being. The tracking spell flew to the nearest of the silent stone palaces and remained fixed overhead like a distant planet at moonrise, shining without twinkle or flutter. _Emma is here._ It made Killian's stomach turn over, and he forced down his apprehension. He could not, could _not_ , despite a long and illustrious career of it, do something stupid now.

He brought the _Dutchman_ in, mercifully without a crash, and he, Robin, Regina, Henry, Elsa, and Anna warily advanced off. He kept turning his head in all directions, trying to catch any flicker of movement in the shadows, but it was impossible to tell. Elsa and Regina had their hands up, ready to freeze solid and then burn to bits whatever unwise person should suddenly startle them, and Killian had his sword half-drawn, Robin with an arrow loosely nocked. Anna had grabbed a large old-fashioned cutlass which she clearly had no idea what to do with, and Henry had some sort of heavy brass bottle clutched in both hands, evidently with which he planned to administer a few righteous whacks if the need should be called for. Not that they should let it come to that – the lad was only eleven, he shouldn't have to –

Something pulled at Killian's mind for half a second, but he was too focused on getting to Emma to pay it much heed. Regina economically disposed of the warding spell on the door, and they stole through into an even more complete darkness, their footsteps whispering ghosts on the cold flagstone floors. There was some kind of strange glow ahead, and Killian's not inconsiderable experience with such matters was sufficient to identify it as magical in nature. He sped up, almost running, trailing his motley crew behind him. Whipped around the corner into some sort of throne room – saw her, her back to him, blonde hair falling thick and loose – like he breathed at last, drawing air ragged and raw into his lungs that burst forth as a shout –

" _SWAN!"_

Emma whirled around, taken completely off guard. She had never looked more beautiful than she did then, face white as snow, lips red as blood, eyes green as emeralds, wearing some sort of black gown that fell in deep lace whorls around her feet – and she had never looked more alien, more deadly, not like a woman but something borrowing her face and flesh, devouring her. Her hands flared out, trying reflexively to keep him back. He never broke stride. He could see what it was on the far side: the Chair of St Edward, and the Stone of Scone. Jafar must have brought them here, as close to Westminster Abbey on the other side of the veil as he could, and she was – Emma was about to break the wards, but _why,_ why would she be doing what he wanted, was she still controlled by that infernal black dagger or had she, even worse, _chosen_ to –

Killian Bartholomew Jones did not intend to let anyone find out. As the magic erupted from her fingers, he threw everything he had into one last mad leap, and flew.

* * *

The silence after the pirate's body had hit the floor was thunderous, crashing, immense, roiling out like waves. Emma blinked once and then again, scrubbing at her face, not sure what had just happened, how he had – how had he – ? Come from nowhere and absorbed the full strength of the power she had meant to shatter the – but why was she – what was she _wearing?_ Jafar – why had she come with him, _Christ,_ what had he done to her?

"Hook?" Her voice emerged thin and frail, a little girl's, the illusion of a dark and terrible queen crumbled all at once. "Hook? Killian?"

He didn't answer, steam still rising from his scorched leathers, and she broke into a run, kneeling at his side, fumbling at him with shaking fingers. "Killian? _Killian?"_

She saw the thinnest, unfocused slit of blue under the dark fringe of his eyelashes, and had to restrain herself from shaking him. Her hands clamped onto his shoulders, holding him tight, as air rushed into her lungs and tears stung at her eyes. She bent over him, waiting until she saw the faint trip of the pulse in his neck, until a voice behind her said, "My dear, you seem to be forgetting the purpose of your excursion here. Come back and finish it, if you would be so kind."

Emma stiffened, waiting for the power of the black dagger to coil around her arms and legs, force her upright to march back to him, do his will – but it didn't come, and it didn't come. Somehow, when Killian had taken that blast of her magic, it reflected back and broke the coercion, the thrall that Jafar had over her. She bit her lip until she tasted blood. "You idiot," she whispered. "You could have killed yourself."

He had just enough wherewithal to give her a cocky smirk, which might have made her smack him if he had been in a less vulnerable state. She remained crouched over him protectively, until Jafar cleared his throat again, less patiently. "Miss Swan. Come _here._ Otherwise, I have a multitude of hostages to choose from, and this _will_ get messy."

"Hey!" Henry, of course, elected that moment to bolt from behind a pillar. "You bugger _off!"_

Emma shot upright in shock at hearing her son's voice, especially seeing that he had a heavy brass bottle raised overhead. "Henry! What – what are you – "

"Henry!" Regina shouted at the same time. "Get _away_ from – "

"Oh no." Jafar became suddenly and utterly alert, and just as still. "Come here, boy. And that bottle. So curious. Where did you get it?"

"Leave my mum alone," Henry ordered. "Otherwise I'll – I'll object very fiercely!" he added, doing his level best to sound threatening.

"Never fear. I discover that my interest in her has been quite diminished, just the moment." A broad smile was spreading over Jafar's face. "Tell me, boy. Did you find that at the Dark Castle?"

"Yes," Henry said uncertainly. "But you can't – "

"HENRY!" Despite Emma's best efforts, Killian sat bolt upright, and nearly made it to his feet, before dropping back to his knees. "DON'T GIVE IT TO HIM!"

Regina's jaw dropped. "Wait – is that – ?"

"Indeed," Jafar said airily. "I was trying to get our friend to summon it earlier, but he failed. Oh, how perfectly providential that it was on its way to me anyway. The third bottle from the City of Brass, and the last thing I need to change the laws and foundations of magic. Well done, boy." He held out a hand. "If you please."

Henry remained fixed to the spot. "I'm not giving it to you."

"Idiot," Jafar sighed. "Of course you are."

With that, he waved a hand, crushing Henry back with a blow from an invisible fist. The bottle flew free, arcing in a perfect parabola toward him –

Both Elsa and Regina let loose, gouts of ice and fire sweeping the stone from pillar to pillar, but nothing, to no avail, magic echoing and scattering crazily, until the din was deafening, until there was only brightness and blindness –

Until Jafar caught the bottle, and the world exploded.


	24. Chapter 24

Emma woke beneath the sharp-slanted eaves of the majestic, sprawling attic bedchamber, the black velveteen curtains lashed to the posts and weak sunlight paving the bare floorboards. The racket of a thousand celebratory fireworks still echoed disagreeably in her head, as the sky over London had been lit up like a Roman candle all night to fete the turning of the century – the world speeding on toward Progress, as exemplified by the massive white city at Chicago's great Fair and the spread of Europe's might across every corner of the map, with steam and aether, gears and wheels, the might of the British Empire and the magic of the Royal Society, and that new invention which among many others had come from the World's Fair: the Gatling and Hotchkiss guns. Indeed, Anno Domini 1900 would see the march of history bent to the will of a new master. On the first day of the first month of the first year of the first decade of the twentieth century, anything and everything seemed exquisitely possible.

Emma lay still a moment more, then pushed herself upright, swung her legs over the side of the massive featherbed, and stood. It was quite the sumptuous affair to sleep in alone, and still a handsome woman at past seventy, with thick, glossy silver hair that curled almost to her waist, catlike green eyes, fine skin and a figure that rarely needed a corset's help at achieving the desired hourglass, she could have found someone to share it with even now, if she was much inclined, but she was not. Not after Killian, never again. She had power for that now, power for everything. People came and went. Only magic lasted forever.

She dressed before the mirror in the fashionable slim-lined, high-waisted dress of the day, a dark horehound chequey with engraved silver buttons, bouffant upper sleeves, and a hemline just high enough to offer a peep of heeled boots. She did her own hair, coiling it and piling it beneath a broad-brimmed black hat, jabbing the hatpin with its wilted silk-crepe flowers in place and lowering the scrap of gauze to demurely shield her face. The fur-collared overcoat, belted stylishly. Last came the smooth white gloves, buttoned at the wrist, and the pocketbook with its mother-of-pearl clasp. The parasol, as ever, with its trusty silver tip. After one more severe glance at her reflection, which sometimes had a tendency to smile and curtsy after she had already turned away, Madame Swan crossed to the door, descended the stairs, and stepped out into the teeming London streets.

Small boys were everywhere, brandishing commemorative editions of all the city's newspapers, and revelers who had taken a drop too much last night were being hauled out of gutters and shut into paddywagons by the Metropolitan, thus to dry out at some unspecified location until they were no longer a danger to themselves or the general public. Telegraph wires clicked and airships droned, businessmen in their black bowlers puzzled over the Stock Exchange, and Emma strode purposefully through the whole chaos and moil of it, keeping her skirts out of the mud. She climbed aboard a trolley, punched a sixpence into the farebox, and thus endured an eventful ride from Kensington to Downing Street, where she debarked only slightly the worse for wear. She turned down the lane, the streetlamps still glowing faintly in the last shreds of morning mist, then up the steps to Number 10. Raising the bronze knocker, she rapped it firmly, thrice.

A moment later, the door swung open of its own accord, and Emma stepped through, removing her overcoat and hanging it on the hook, before she adjusted her hat and clicked down the parquet hallway, past ornately wall-papered sitting rooms and the glowering oil portraits of previous worthies. At the terminus, she reached the office door and knocked again, then let herself in. "Prime Minister. Good morning."

"Ah, my dear." Impeccably garbed in frocked morning coat, watered-silk cravat, and pinstriped trousers so sharply pleated you could have sliced a wheel of cheese with them, Jafar glanced up and smiled. "You look radiant as ever, of course. Please, please, do sit. The shipment of Darjeeling arrived yesterday, and it is simply sublime. The champagne of teas, it is called. Shall I have a cup fetched?"

"That would be lovely, thank you." Emma seated herself in the high-backed chair across from his desk, smoothing her skirts. "Only you would be working on a public holiday, and one so momentous as this. London won't recover from its hangover for a fortnight."

"All the better for us to get our affairs in order without interference, wouldn't you say?" Jafar stirred the porcelain cup of tea perched atop a pile of official dispatches. "And truly, there is so much to do. Britain will not be caught sleeping at such a pivotal time, you may have my word on that. I hardly know where to begin, but, well. . . out with the old, in with the new, in more ways than one. Our good queen Victoria has served us long and well, but she is frightfully old, and I daresay an upjumped Scottish groomsman was the real power behind the throne for the last decade or so. What better time than a new century for a changing of the guard, a new ruler?"

"Oh?" Emma arched a skeptical eyebrow. "Is that so? When all this time, Her Majesty has been well known to loathe Prince Albert? She'd live forever sooner than having to hand over power to him."

"How fortunate for us all that she does not have that choice." Jafar smiled again, oddly. "And Bertie. . . my dear, whoever said anything about poor old Bertie, who has spent his life waiting to be king and is not likely to do anyone the least amount of good once he finally lumbers to the throne – if it doesn't collapse from beneath his fat arse, that is? Did you know, he had a special chair built so he could properly fornicate without embarrassingly overburdening lesser furniture? And he has such a taste for French women and the brothels of Paris that I expect he shall negotiate an _entente cordiale_ with the National Assembly, just so it's less of a bother getting over there when England and France remain technically enemies. No, we – and Bertie – will all be so much happier if he never gets within sniffing distance of the crown. Leave him to fuck and fart and drink in peace, and we shall rearrange matters to suit. His royal mother still blames him for the death of the Prince Consort, you know – I suppose we do have him to thank for that. If Victoria had not been so isolated in her hysterical grief all these decades, I surely could not have built and accomplished all that I have." He leaned back, steepling his fingers. "And hence, we must see at all costs that our legacy is secured for the future."

"Is that so?" Emma said again, slower. She could see what he was proposing well enough, and could not say that she was entirely surprised. For as much as Jafar had sculpted the legacy of the Empire with battle, magical, and diplomatic brilliance alike, he had done it just as much or more so with her, behind the scenes. She had quietly removed all number of irksome foes for him over the years, taken assignments in every remote corner of the Empire, used her peerless guile and skill – and deadly aim with a pistol, not to mention her legendary reputation as a sorceress – to see that things remained as they were meant to be. Who else would he turn to, but the Black Swan? Whatever else, whoever else, she had lost along the way, that was merely collateral damage. This was her life, had been for decades, and would not change with the advent of the new century. Though for Jafar to openly allude to assassinating the Queen-Empress of Great Britain and India, and with her the Prince of Wales. . . that was quite beyond the pale of anything he had asked before. He'd best be sure he could afford the fee.

"And?" Emma said, when he made no move to offer further details. "I expect someone would have to lead the nation in its grief, and altruistically accept temporary power for the public good. Someone such as the Prime Minister, I wager?"

"Dear me, I would never be so crude as to _suggest_ it." Jafar shuddered. "Though if it was offered, surely it would be selfish to refuse. Victoria's loss, of course, would not be unexpected. Bertie, well. . . nobody would be surprised either if he keeled over one day after a cigar and sherry too many. And since Victoria, frigid as she might be in public, was quite the profligate vixen behind closed doors, there will be a multitude of inbred little Germans scuttling in for their bite at the pie, which is certain to sharply depreciate public opinion of all these lazy aristocratic layabouts. Whereas I am trusted beyond all measure. The people will beg for me. Really, it is simplicity. You will attend to the small matter at Westminster, of course, and _voila,_ a revolution _sans-sang."_

Emma was quiet a moment, considering. Then she said, "You've been Prime Minister for decades, and the monarchy notably unpopular in a great deal of that time. Why wait until now?"

"Why, indeed." Jafar removed a small flask from his breast pocket, unscrewed it, and poured a dash into his tea, just as the servant appeared with hers. He waved them out, then went on, "You must understand that changing the way things are simply does not happen overnight. For all their deficiencies, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is heir to a dynasty nearly a millennium old, and for them to be swept away from nowhere. . . that would be counterproductive, don't you see? The people would be inclined to cause difficulty, even of course not understanding in the least what they were standing in the way of. This way, I have had all the time needed to sow the proper seeds. Now they will cheer me to my rightful place, not hinder me." He smiled. "Do you see?"

"Oh yes," Emma murmured, lifting her steaming cup and taking a genteel sip. It occurred to her that she couldn't quite remember when Jafar had become Prime Minister, or how, but she brushed that aside. "Are you certain, though? That the moment is now?"

"Quite." Jafar opened a jar of blackberry compote and spread it on his biscuit. "I ask you, my dear, what fun would it have been, being a king in the Middle Ages? All you have to kill your enemies with is a clumsy broadsword, it is cold and filthy and insanitary, your decrees take frightfully long to get anywhere on the back of a messenger who might be shot off his horse or die of the flux, and some tiresome religious authority is meddling in your affairs half the time, making it far more difficult than it must be. Now we have telegraphs, trolleys, electricity, indoor plumbing, and _so_ much more. I would only want to live in such a moment. And every day, of course, man develops more refined and effective and easier ways to kill other men. You rarely need get your hands dirty at all, what when technology will do it for you. Every piss-drunk provincial warlord dreams of ruling the world, but to choose _when_ you wish to do so, and how, now _that_ is the mark of true innovation. I'm offering you a share in it." He raised his teacup to hers, lightly chiming the golden rims. "You've served me well. Do think carefully."

Emma smiled tersely. "We shall see, shan't we? So what would this entail? Smuggling me into the New Year's party at Buckingham Palace, thus to dispose of the Queen and Prince Albert? Surely not at the same time?"

"Of course not. Indeed, we would send you to the party tonight as my personal representative, with a certain substance to dose the Queen's drink. Not fast-acting, of course, but the sort of thing to start a brief illness that ends with her much-mourned death, her being old and it not unexpected. While the country is draping black veils on everything and turning out to watch her catafalque roll past with six white horses, that is when Bertie is. . . oh, I'm not quite sure, involved in a terrible train accident. Or has a heart attack in the midst of an orgy, I'm rather fond of that possibility. We are talking a fortnight or two, at most six weeks. That is all the time I need to have everything in place."

"Ah." Emma sipped her tea. "Ingenious, really. But if I work with you on this, I assume you have some sort of plan for shielding me from any suspicion?"

"Of course, my dear," Jafar assured her magnanimously. "Though you _are_ a professional, so far be it from me to suggest that you don't know how to keep your hands clean. But no, there is nothing you need to worry about. Merely use your power in my service, and all will be seen to."

Emma did not answer. She supposed that if he _was_ attempting to enlist her cooperation in a venture of this magnitude, the compensation would be considerable – though at this point, she had all the money she wanted. All the stature, all the renown, all the fear, and there was nothing else on earth she needed any more. Once more something pricked at her, as if there was something she should remember, but just as before, she brushed it aside. The Black Swan did as she would, spread her wings to cast a shadow long and lasting, stood for nothing and stopped for no one. It had burned her hard, fired her as if in a kiln, until no scrap of weakness or scruple or shame remained. Only what must be done.

Only what must be done.

* * *

The pirate ship swayed and rocked as it sailed beneath the silver-grey clouds, the spires and streets and towers of London spread out below in a cluttered patchwork of stone and smoke, as Killian Jones checked the bearings on the chart and made a precise adjustment to the wheel. He had to be careful, what with the holds groaning with treasure, that he didn't come about too fast and overbalance, but that was the best of all problems to have. It had been a wildly successful raid on the transatlantic convoys returning from Britain's overseas colonies, and the _Roger_ was stuffed to the gills with ill-gotten gains: gold and silver ore, uncut gemstones, timber and tea and tiger skins, rum and sugar and spices, porcelain and iron and ivory, not to mention countless magical oddments both large and small. All of it was destined for sale on the Night Market at as exorbitant a price as any buyer cared to pay, and Killian had a particular use in mind for his cut of the take. And with some disposable capital in his pocket, he planned to have himself quite a night tonight.

The _Roger_ swooped lower and lower over the slaty curl of the Thames, then down to its dock, and the hawsers were made fast as its thrusters powered down and the lodestone went dark. The cargo had to be unloaded, which took a dismally long while as Killian supervised with an eagle eye; any of the crew found illicitly pinching the spoils would, he had made it known, be subject to an immediate and public flogging. This threat was sufficient to ensure that no such thievery took place, and once the hold was emptied and the goods catalogued, loaded up and prepared for transportation to the Market as soon as it opened, they were dismissed from duty. That included him as well, and as a cold mist was falling apace with the deepening twilight, he turned up his collar, hailed a brougham, and set off into the city.

The journey through the side streets and twisting wynds made his heart beat faster, and by the time they rolled to a stop before the tavern with the red blown-glass lantern casting bloody shadows, his feet felt as if they had wings. He tossed the coachman a shilling, then once the man was gone, strode up, whispered the password, and waited until the heavy door croaked open and he stepped – quite literally – into the inferno beyond.

The Hellfire Club had an utterly pernicious reputation in London. The complete antithesis of the well-bred societies on Pall Mall – the sorcerers' den of the Athanaeum, the congregations of civilized men with civilized interests – it boasted a sinister legacy of rumored devil-worship, alchemy and blasphemy, sordid sexual perversions and other scandalous liberties, the horror doubtless stemming at least in part from its policy of admitting women as well as men. Various crusading moralists and Members of Parliament had tried on multiple occasions to eradicate it, but it still persisted, though its headquarters had to be moved often to stay one step ahead of its enemies. In the dim, smoky interior, you might stumble across a lively discussion on the philosophy of Voltaire and Rousseau, or on the scientific properties of aether, or an attempted demon-summoning (one in the past, having actually been successful and promptly wreaking utter havoc, ensured that the name "Bartimaeus" was remembered with no great affection). Absinthe was generally the beverage of choice, and a sweet murk of opium lingered in the air, with other, stranger poisons. Shadows did not always seem to match their casters, and passages led away into the dark warren of the building, twisting and turning like the veins of a heart. Yet when Killian Jones stepped inside, as it had been for several months now, he had no interest in any of this esoterica. Only one thing. Only her.

He found her after only a few moments of searching, seated at the bar with a glass of iridescent blue liquid, coolly disdaining the advances of some infatuated little tosser in a bowler hat. Killian casually jostled the chap out of the way with his shoulder, paying no attention to the squawk of protest from the floor, and slid up close behind her, mouth in her hair, as he breathed, "Miss me, Swan?"

She turned to look at him, green eyes dazzling in the low light. "Captain. I didn't realize you were back already."

"Oh, the raids went far better than expected," Killian said jauntily, signaling the bartender for another round. "Sitting ducks, the lot. Look what I've brought you, love."

With that, he reached into his pocket and presented her with a diamond necklace, lifting her blonde braid out of the way to fasten it around her slender throat. The jewels glittered mesmerizingly as she turned to admire it in the mirrored bar, one elegant hand floating up to caress it, a sly half-smile plucking at her mouth. "Diamonds? You really _must_ have missed me."

"More than you know, darling," he whispered, leaning in for a kiss, but Emma deftly turned away, accepting the drinks from the bartender. She handed his to him and kept hers for herself, throwing it back in a shot, seemingly inclined to care less about all the valorous details he had been bursting to share. Christ, she drove him mad, this woman, this bloody seductress, teasing and toying with him. She'd make him work for it, as she had every time since they'd first come together like a pair of crashing stars. He might burn with lust at the thought of her beneath him, white limbs asprawl on linen sheets, mouth opening rosebud pink, wet and warm, to moan into his as he took her, took her home, hard and harder, once and then again – but getting her there was not a task to be underestimated.

So it was as usual, as he pulled out every charming witticism or romantic maneuver he could think of, and she accepted them with that infuriatingly mysterious smile, a Mona Lisa made flesh. It was difficult to be clever when so little of his blood was in his brain, but eventually he began to soften even her, and the veil of demure restraint she wore around herself, keeping him at arm's length until he could damn well prove he would not back away. Until at last her mouth began to follow his, and her hand began to stroke him beneath the table, and they moved closer and closer, locked into each other's orbits, until he jerked his head at the stairs, and her smile broadened. He offered her his hand, and she took it.

Also as usual, they barely made it up to the second floor before her arms were around his neck, his hand was caressing the curve of her arse through the rustling layers of her skirts, and his hook was industriously ripping at the laces of her bodice. They swayed up to the landing, into the hall, and fell through the nearest door into the small chamber beyond, with a low-burning oil lamp and a brass bedstead. Her fingers fumbled at the buttons on his red vest as he returned the favor; the shoulders of her dress fell down to her waist, exposing her tight-laced red corset, smooth full breasts swelling out the top. He bent his head, kissing, lavishing devotion upon them, as the encumbering garments were finally stripped off and he took a nipple in his mouth, round and dark as a champagne grape. He sucked and licked, breath hot on her fine skin; she moaned and twisted her hands in his hair, urging him closer, as he lifted her and she wrapped her legs around his waist as they walked backward, toppling heavily onto the bed with a squeak of old springs. He did not care, would not have noticed if the place lived up to its name and burst into flames on the instant. He was already burning.

Emma wriggled beneath him, aligning their hips, as he kept on tearing at her skirts, the lacy lawn of her underthings, until his questing hand finally found the warm wet sweetness between her legs and both of them moaned aloud. He swore under his breath, gently working one and then two fingers into her, as her walls spasmed around him in quick short pulses and he rubbed the pad of his thumb into her nub, working and circling deeper as she panted. He nipped at her neck, and she sucked his earlobe between her teeth, lightly tugging on the dangling jewel. Their skin pressed together, lines blurring and melding and molding like hot smelted metal as he looped his hook around the headboard to brace himself, and drew his hand out of her as she grasped hold of him, her own thumb running maddeningly along the silky shaft of his painfully hard cock. Until she whispered, "Fine then, Captain, time to pillage and plunder," and guided him down into her.

He moaned as he slid home, thrusting into her in a long, sinuous roll of the hips like ocean waves, her hands low on the small of his back as she moved with him, digging in her heels and arching up into him so there was no whisper, no inch, no barest breath where they were not one, heads turning and moving in time as he fucked her as thoroughly above as he did below, tongue exploring her mouth in slow deep sweeps. He pulled her lower lip between his teeth, sucking and teasing, grasping hold of the bedstead with his good hand as well to throw the weight of his body behind his strokes, as she hiked up one knee and her hair fell thick and loose, white-gold in the lamplight, more beautiful than any magical dust or breaking dawn. He buried himself in her to the hilt, lost himself beyond all measure, came undone and unstrung, fell down and down, and drowned.

It was some indeterminate time later when he came back to himself, the two of them still sprawled on the bed in a tangle of boneless limbs and torn clothes, his back heaving as he struggled to gulp enough air. She was stroking his head, and he got himself together more or less and managed to remove the most uncomfortable bits of the leather he hadn't bothered with before. Then he lay back down beside her, content just to look at her, the diamond necklace resting in the deep swell of her breasts. "God," he whispered. "You are so beautiful."

Emma gave him a satisfied, sleepy grin. "Daresay you've had too much rum, Captain."

"I have not." He lifted her hand, mouthing gently over her knuckles. "I can see just fine, if you mean to intimate that all lasses are beautiful by drink and candlelight. You. . ." A pause as he took her index finger into his mouth, sucking lightly, then lowered his head to plant a slow trail of kisses from breastbone to belly, low on her stomach. "Are far beyond that. Divine, and unspeakably. . ." His tongue flicked out to taste her, teasing at her slick folds, and she moaned, quivering. "Delicious."

She still had enough wits to pant out some challenge, and he, not being the sort to back down, gave her all she could stand and more. It was very late indeed by the time they finally untangled themselves from the sweaty, knotted sheets, dressed badly and slowly, not willing to leave each other. But they did not spend the night together. They met only in the shadows of the Hellfire Club and never saw each other in daylight. She knew what he was, as he knew her; the bonds of London, its underworld, its piracy and profit, dancing perpetually on the edge of a knife, held them both too strongly. Perhaps there was no future, but for now, they could still make time stop.

The waning moon had sunk behind the steep-shingled roofs when Killian finally emerged into the chill night air, breath steaming. He was wary about retracing his path to the _Roger,_ never wanting to be predictable or visible in his movements; as soon as everything was sold, they'd be abroad again, never giving the Royal Society time to catch up. Yet it occurred to him as he walked, in a vague unimportant way, that he couldn't remember exactly when he had started doing so well as a pirate, or even quite when he had met Emma. Rum fog or not, he should know.

Killian stopped abruptly on the filthy cobbles, frowning. Revenge. . . hadn't he wanted revenge, lived for it, desired it beyond all things? On Gold, yes, on the President of the Royal Society. Had he gotten it? He couldn't remember either, and that made a hard knot of panic pull tight in his chest. Had he been blind all this time, forgetting everything that gave his existence point and purpose? No, there was Emma, she was certainly worth living for, if nothing else. But when had they become lovers? When had he gotten the _Roger_ back? He couldn't quite pin it down, but he had a faint image of it burning, smashed and wrecked on the lawn before the imperious spires of Westminster Abbey. The golem. . . Queen Elsa and her ice. . . Will dying in their arms. . . Blackbeard. . . the shadow world. . . Henry. . .

Something even colder than the dank wind washed over Killian in a flood, rooting his feet to the ground. He raised his hand and rubbed at his temples, blinking hard in the vain hope that he might wake up. He didn't. Wherever he was, however he had gotten here, it was as neatly and completely as if someone had ripped him up from the earth, replanted him in alien soil. And Emma. . . was she even the _real_ Emma, or had she too been stolen into another reality, bent to serve the dark purpose of the puppetmaster staging this demented little tableau? He could not shake the feeling that he had been pawned off here, given a lucrative pirate's life and no-strings-attached sex, in hopes of keeping him distracted and occupied from interfering in whatever Jafar – yes, that was his name, bloody hell, Jafar – really had in mind. Away from Emma, away from helping her – or stopping him.

 _Christ._ Killian's knees felt weak as he took in the full magnitude of the implications, of what must have happened after the bastard got his hands on the third of the three bottles he had wanted since the beginning, granting him some sort of ultimate power over power itself, magic and space and time, twisting and refashioning everything to suit himself. And he had no idea how, but he had to find his way to the place and time where Emma had been taken. If this had been done, it could still be undone. Perhaps. But whatever little time he had to do so might well already be gone.

As he stood there, failing miserably at staving off abject panic, something occurred to him. The compass, the golden compass, the one Jafar had wanted in the first place, back at the Royal Society's booth at the Great Exhibition. The one he'd had Will steal and thus began this entire sordid story, the fake of which he had given to Emma, which had originally drawn them into fateful convergence. Compasses were navigational tools, obviously, and he'd never known or bothered to ask why Jafar wanted this one. But now it fell on him, clear and sharp as ice. The magic of the compass must guide you between worlds and realities, through space and shadow. It was how Jafar had boxed them off into their separate traps, and how he intended to find his way back to the correct reality once he had achieved whatever he had in mind. That was why Gold had wanted it returned so badly – it was how he made sure his periodic excursions into the fae world on the other side of the wardrobe, to the Dark Castle and wherever else he went there, had a happy ending. Without it, he could certainly go in, but there was no guarantee he'd come out.

Very well. Killian's mission was set. No matter what, come possibly literal hellfire, he had to find the compass. Had Jafar been so obliging as to just leave it in his Paris mansion? No, not likely. It must be with him. But the fake one that Killian himself had given Emma. . . that must still be here in London, and Jafar had said that the two had a connection. It was how he had originally contrived to spy on Gold and learn all his activities, so if Killian, paradoxically, could just retrieve the fake, it would lead him true.

At last, galvanized out of his immobility, he began to move. Walked, then trotted, then broke into a full-out run. If nothing else, he knew Gold, knew his haunts. Knew he was a creature of habit. Knew where he spent his time, and (by and large) where he kept his treasure. There were only a finite number of places the fake could be. Gold wouldn't have gotten rid of it, even after learning what it was. He was a hoarder to the bone, never let any magical object that fell into his grasp slip out of it again, not if there was the slightest advantage to be gleaned from it. It was here, somewhere. Whether Emma would be, by the time Killian reached her – no. He could not think about that. Not now. Only what must be done.

Only what must be done.

* * *

When her breakfast with the Prime Minister was concluded, Emma departed for Harrod's department store, so she could select her apparel for regicide in style. Jafar had told her to return around four o'clock in the afternoon, where he would supply her with the poison for the Queen and impart her final instructions. Emma felt a brief qualm at the idea of actually going through with this, but it faded almost at once. What good had the Queen and Great Britain done her, when Henry died in the bloody Boer War in the South African colonies, nineteen years ago, for their diamonds and their greed? When they hanged Killian as a pirate and traitor on Execution Dock, so that she still saw the image in her head waking and sleeping – his body dangling, neck broken, a skeleton withering in the wind for weeks and weeks, until there was nothing left but a gruesome shattered shell of the man she had loved so well? No. She felt no remorse. She'd kill Victoria, and gladly.

After having selected her dress – a magnificent concoction of black silk and tulle, with small onyx jewels catching up the skirt, long gauzy sleeves like wings, until she almost thought she had some strange memory of going to another ball many years ago, the Black Swan rising – she had it packaged up, tucked it under her arm, and returned to Downing Street, where Jafar inspected her choice with satisfaction. "Lovely, my dear. You shall certainly be the belle of the ball, in more ways than one. That reminds me – I do have my own soiree to attend tonight, with the Royal Society, so when you're finished, you're free to find your own entertainment, whatever you fancy that to be."

"The Royal Society?" Emma raised an eyebrow. "You?"

"Oh yes." Jafar smiled. "It's their New Year's meeting, when they drink sherry in the drawing room and have their little dozen-course supper and otherwise celebrate their power and invincibility and plans for another year of insufferable arrogance. Well, they have served their purpose, don't you think? Built the Empire as high as it could go, and now as a new century dawns, well. . . it's such an archaic institution, with such a long list of dishonorable deeds to its discredit. If something were to happen. . ."

"Oh?" Emma echoed. "Why do I get the feeling that something _will?"_

"Still as clever as you are beautiful. Such a fine investment I have made." Jafar offered her a brief, flourishing bow. "Indeed, that regretfully appears to be on the agenda. A dreadful explosion will level the house where we are gathered, and when I, the only survivor, am pulled bloodied and coughing from the rubble, a national hero will be born. An iconic image, a legacy of a fiendish and cowardly attack on the heart of Britain itself. With the entire Royal Society dead, measures must be swiftly taken to ensure our security. Therefore. . ." He shrugged. "They will hand all the power to me."

"Indeed." Emma studied their reflections in the looking glass across the parlor, the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder, the lone conspirators in this great and terrible game. If there was grief, if there was anything besides a dull curiosity, wondering how it had come to this, it was not strong enough to push through the shell and armor she had cocooned herself in ever deeper. "I suppose we both have to prepare ourselves, then."

"As you say." Jafar clicked his fingers. "Boy!"

A long pause, and then the door on the far side of the room opened. A slight man in tattered livery limped through, shaggy grey hair almost hiding his face, but Emma knew him nonetheless. She said nothing, merely watched coolly, as Jafar took a seat, put his boots up on the coffee table, and beckoned Robert Gold to polish them. This was the least of the punishment he deserved, after what he had done to Killian, and her fists clenched involuntarily. Too kind. Jafar had been too kind.

"No smudges," Jafar ordered, as Gold fumbled with the boot-blacking rag. "And if you stain the mahogany, it's worse than a whipping for you. Of course someone of your ilk would be bloody stupid. Did you press my jacket?"

"Yes, my lord," Gold mumbled, wiping a spare smear of polish off the toe. "As you wish. I'll have the carriage fetched round shortly."

"You will have the carriage fetched when I order it." Jafar cuffed him over the back of the head. "Have you not learned your lesson _yet?"_

"Yes, my lord." Gold scrubbed vigorously, until Jafar's boots were a gleaming black, then carefully removed the soiled rag and returned shortly with Jafar's smartly starched, double-breasted evening coat and fine beaver tophat. The Prime Minister donned both of these with ostentatious care, admired his reflection with satisfaction, and made a negligent gesture, dismissing his slave to the carriage-house.

When he had gone, Jafar turned to Emma. "I do wish to see you in your full glory before I depart," he said, and made a quick gesture. She was briefly engulfed in red smoke, and when it cleared, she was clad in the Black Swan gown, hair elaborately upswept and crowned with a tiara of jet and silver, eyes darkly lined with kohl, lips painted blood-crimson. The effect was startling and more than slightly terrifying, and she regarded it with approval. This was her hour, as much as his. It was time.

Jafar offered her his arm, and the two of them stepped out into the cold, dank evening, as the carriage rolled up before the stoop. He handed her into the luxurious interior, and they sat side by side, not speaking, as the footman cracked the whip and they set off into the busy maelstrom of holiday traffic. Emma looked out the window at London passing like a dream, had a strange and unshakable sensation that she should, that she must wake up – but how could she, when she was not asleep? Perhaps it was some vain hope that this was still only a nightmare. But it wasn't, had been her life for a small eternity, past remembering. Only pain. Only loss. Only vengeance.

At last, the carriage rolled to a halt in the rotunda of Buckingham Palace, which was crowded with all the other assorted conveyances bringing British nobility to the Queen's New Year and centennial celebration. Heavy aether chandeliers hung in the tall columned portico, casting eerie golden light, and the footman came round to open the door and help Emma down. Jafar waved at her. "See you soon, my dear."

Emma nodded tersely, stepping out into the whirl of gaiety and feeling, for a long moment, utterly and desolately alone. Light spilled from all the windows, uniformed servants whisked here and there, and gentleman in monocles and top hats escorted their bejeweled womenfolk up the broad marble stairs into the heart of the inferno. She touched the small vial in her pocket, which Jafar had slipped there without a word en route, and wondered what exactly it was, whether a magical or merely mundane poison. It would not be hard to get close enough to the Queen to dose her drink with it, and then her part would be done. Let Jafar complete his coup. She was an old woman, and she had lived too long alone, in bitterness and rage and loneliness beyond bearing. If she died in this, she did not much care.

Still the palace and the lure and the brightness of the party beckoned to her. All she had to do was move, one more step, one more time. One more. One more.

Emma lifted her skirts with her dainty lace-gloved hands, and started toward inevitability.

And then, from behind, someone – _something –_ grabbed her wrist.

She almost screamed, biting her lip just in time, unable to think who would assault her, _her_ in public, in the very precincts of Buckingham itself – then looked down, saw that what had hold of her arm was not a hand but in fact a gleaming steel _hook,_ and turned lightheaded. Could not move, nor even think about it, as a man's voice whispered urgently behind her, "Please, love. Wait. Listen to me. Listen. You – you – I don't know if you remember or not, or even what in the blazes happened, but – my name is Killian Jones, and I've come to help you."


	25. Chapter 25

"Killian." The shock flashed through Emma like an electrical current, feeding on itself and growing stronger, liquefying her bones, clenching around her heart. All the obvious questions – about how he could possibly have survived, how he could even be here, whether this was some sort of simulacrum or delusion tricked up by Jafar to ensure her commitment to the cause – bubbled to her lips, then died aborning. She could only stare at him, not looking a day older than when they had marched him in chains to the gallows by the Thames, and he, ever defiant, had blown sarcastic kisses to the women and offered succinct and obscene gestures to the men. As she had been struggling furiously, desperate to get to his side, to have one last farewell – their final kiss ripped apart by the guards as she screamed and fought them, a cuff over the cheek knocking her half-senseless as they warned they could still kill her too – seeing his silhouette against the sun as they slipped the noose around his neck, and then the _sound –_ the crack and thump of the trapdoor, the snap of the rope, and the way the breath went out of the crowd all at once, and then all that was left was silence. She couldn't, would _not_ believe it, and yet she said it again. _"Killian?"_

"Swan." He scratched behind his ear and glanced away, oddly diffident. "It's confusing – I'm still not sure what happened, exactly. It was something that bloody Jafar did, once he got hold of the bottles – he changed things, altered our realities. I'll try to explain later, but right now – "

"What are you talking about? What bottles?" Emma's fingers twitched, missing the old, familiar weight of her derringer. It occurred to her that instead of being sent by Jafar, he could be some deceitful manifestation of the enemy, something triggered by the protective spells around Buckingham Palace. "Killian – you're dead, I watched you die. You can't be – "

He flinched. "No, love, look. Jafar created false memories for you, and God knows what else. I don't know what he told you to do, but come on – I've got the compass, we might be able to – "

"Stop. Stop talking." Emma held out her hands, backing away from him, stealing a look over her shoulder to see whether the guards had taken an interest – an eventuality which would be either very good or very bad – but no one had. "After fifty years, you suddenly reappear right when I – "

Killian blinked, frowned, then stared at her, as if only now realizing the fact that she was a stately matron of over seventy, hair silvered and face lined, still slim and elegant and sharp as a knife, but hardened and worn and turned to solid steel. For a moment, even though he had to be some sort of illusion, she quailed at his regard, waiting for him to see only a shadow and a wraith of the woman he had loved, but instead he just kept gazing at her, drinking her up with his eyes, undone and divine. Finally he said softly, "You look just as beautiful, love."

Emma bit her lip, unsure how to respond – were defensive-nexus conjurations usually this convincing? She ached to touch him, to put both hands on his chest, to fold herself into him – but then he really might fade away like morning dew, and selfishly, she wanted to keep him here a bit longer, just a bit. No matter what he was. "You haven't changed at all."

"Should I have?" A hint of that crooked, flirtatious smile, and it made her stomach turn over. "Now, I don't know precisely what you know, or think, or even what you're doing here – but as I said, we need to get away. Somewhere it's safe. I doubt we have much time."

Emma glanced back up the steps of the palace, not entirely willing to trust just yet. She still had the poison. It would be safer that way, more straightforward. But even as much as she wanted it, and knew that if she turned away now there would be far greater consequences to face with Jafar later, she couldn't quite bring herself to lose Killian – whatever phantom of him this was – one more time. It couldn't hurt to find out why. Put a silver throwing star through his heart if it was one of the darker breeds of creature from the underworld (almost stamped out these days, but one could never count out the reemergence of some very deep-buried sleeper cell). It was worth the risk.

"All right," she said after a moment. "We need to find somewhere we won't be interrupted, though. The – " She hesitated, wondering if this version of Killian knew or could be trusted with this information. "The Club?"

He gave her a strange look, then coughed, cheeks turning pink. "The Hellfire Club? Aye."

"Well then." Emma made an impatient gesture with one gloved hand. "Let's get on with it."

Killian still seemed to have something caught in his throat, judging by his intermittent coughing as they unobtrusively circled out of sight of the party and the imperious tall black-furred hats of the guards, bobbing here and there among the crowd like ambulatory beavers. Not willing to catch a trolley or a cabriolet in case Jafar had them watched, Emma instead sketched quickly with her hands, pulling open a hole in the air, rimmed in silver fire. She shooed Killian into it, then ducked in after him, pulling the threads of magic closed behind them.

A brief sensation of immense pressure later, as the world rippled and dissolved and then reshaped into a narrow dark lane several miles away from Buckingham Palace, they stepped out beneath the swinging shingle of the Hellfire Club. It gave Emma a turn to see it; she had rarely ventured here in the years since she had lost Killian, too assailed by the memories. Had left the underworld behind as well, blaming them for the betrayal. But somehow she was stepping up to the door, whispering the password that came as quickly to her lips as if it had just been weeks, or days, since she left. Then it creaked open, shading a dim path into the heart of hell – yet now, here, like this, it must be a dark and sweet and terrible heaven.

The taproom was crowded with those who had a very different sort of New Year's celebration in mind than the rest of London, and they glanced up suspiciously at Emma and Killian's entrance – but she had thought to work a quick glamour to make their features unrecognizable, not wanting the tale of the Prime Minister's assassin and a dead pirate spotted together to spread. Hence, they crossed the floor unmolested to one of the private booths at the back; moth-eaten velvet upholstery and intricate mahogany wainscoting, absinthe-green lamp swinging from a chain and casting eerie drowned light over them both as they slid in. It caught on the cruel curve of his hook as he laid it on the table with a solid-sounding _thunk,_ and she had to clench her fists to stop herself from reaching over, taking his face in her hands, and kissing the breath out of him then and there. "So," she said tersely. "Talk."

Killian regarded her face for a long moment, as if searching for the right words. Then he said, "Why do you work for Jafar?"

"What? I – I have to. After you died, and he became Prime Minister – "

"When did he become Prime Minister?"

"I – " The answer flashed automatically to Emma's lips, then faltered as she realized she had no idea what it was. "I don't. . . I don't remember."

Killian's expression might have held a glimmer of satisfaction, but he didn't stop to rest on his laurels. "And then, the rest of it. . . when did you – did you decide you were. . ." He paused, as if picking his way around an excruciatingly delicate subject. "Fond of me?"

Emma frowned at him, unsure what he was getting at. "How does that help?"

"I just. . . in whatever other timeline I was in, when I remembered that I _couldn't_ remember when we'd become intimate, or indeed why you would have the time of day for me. It was knowing that wasn't really you, that if it was wrong about you it was wrong about everything. . . you were the center of it. And that just. . . unraveled all the lies at once."

"What – are you saying that you knew that – wherever you were was a lie because you knew I didn't – " She faltered on the word, cursed her cowardice, forced it through her lips. "Because you knew I didn't love you?"

If he flinched, it was imperceptible. His voice remained calm, but his eyes dropped to the scarred surface of the table. "Aye."

Emma remained still, not sure how to react. She couldn't tell him it _was_ false, as she had no idea what of anything was. And even more terrifyingly, she could not tell him if it was true. But there was the fact that if she had known she didn't love him, that should undo her false memories as his had been. If he was devoted to her but convinced it was not reciprocated. . . if she had been artificially made to love him, that should be the pivot on which this all turned. Yet it did not. She must, it must be true, without a single drop of interference from Jafar, and so she could not break through. She had lost this time, all of it, all of him, and there was no chance of getting it back.

"Love?" Killian's voice had gone soft, uncertain, as he reached toward her, as if about to caress her chin with his thumb. She jerked back from the gesture, badly unsettled, and saw the briefest flash of pain and disappointment on his face, just as swiftly gone. "Em – Emma?"

"I don't know." She kept her voice tightly controlled. "What am I supposed to remember?"

"Your boy? Henry?"

She laughed, dry as dust. "Henry's dead. He was killed in the Boer War. Years ago. Unless you're going to tell me that he's not either?"

"Well, I can't swear as to what sort of time he may be currently having, but he was alive the last I knew. We all were. We'd found you and Jafar in the shadow world, but Henry had brought the third of the bottles he needed to change time, control the laws of magic. Hence how we ended up trapped in our separate realities, after he did so. I found you with this." He held up a heavy golden compass, beveled crystal face glinting in the low light. "It's the fake compass you stole from me once. Jafar has the real one, and they're connected. It's how he plans to navigate himself back to the correct time once he's finished whatever charming little plot he has in train here. That's why we need to find him first, and take it. With this – " he tapped the fake – "I could travel to where the real one is, but I can't go back from whence I came. So – "

"So if we couldn't get the real one back from Jafar, we'd be stuck here, in this time." A stab of fear went through Emma. She couldn't decide if it would be worse if he was lying, or if he was telling the truth. If she did belong to another reality where Henry was alive, where she was young, where everything was not yet lost, but –

"Are you there?" she asked levelly. "In this time you want to take me back to?"

He paused. "Aye," he said after a moment. "I'm there. What you want to make of it – well, that's your decision, of course."

Emma was quiet. She couldn't think of another reason why he would have risked chasing her across time and space, knowing that failure meant there was no way home – unless, God help her, he was serious. She looked at her hand, lying close to his on the table, yet not quite touching. She remembered the times they would meet here in secret, how difficult she had always made it for him to get close to her, but how that was only an act, a carefully choreographed masque to how the night would always end: in one of the beds upstairs, gasping and thrusting and kissing, sweat-dewed skin in the candlelight, bodies entwined in silhouette against the wall. But had that happened either, or was it like the philosopher Plato's allegory of the cave, the shadows that were only a fleeting, distorted glimpse of a deeper reality, never to be found by the cave-dwellers while they lived? Only imagined, only faded?

There was only one way to find out. Had to put her life in his hands, or at least the one of them available. And if she died, well. . . she'd lived long enough with half a soul that the prospect no longer seemed very frightening. She had only to guard herself against hope. There were too many ways this could go wrong. Yet the price, it seemed, was worth it.

"All right," she said abruptly, and stood up. "Let's find Jafar."

* * *

Easier said than done. London was still awhirl with gaiety and celebrations, drunken revelers tottering on the sidewalks or sliding down walls to snore (best hope they weren't run over by the milkman's wagon in the morning). Fireworks kept going off overhead in coruscations of colorful light and noise, so that they had to hold hands to avoid being separated in the crush. Emma consciously reminded herself of the sensation, in case she never got to feel it again. For his part, he seemed to be considerate of her aged knuckles, not grasping too tightly, although his thumb absently caressed the back of her hand. She ordered herself not to be distracted by it, keeping all her senses on alert for any passing trace of magic. She knew that Jafar had planned for the dinner he was attending with the rest of the Government to be blown up, thus conveniently positioning himself as the sole survivor – but since she had shirked on her portion of the mission, might he have sensed something awry and sped to Buckingham to try to accomplish it in her place? Or turned to something else altogether?

It would have to be Buckingham, Emma decided. She could at least warn the Queen of a plot against her life, or tell her not to be fooled when Jafar made his move for martyrdom. She sped up, dragging Killian behind her like a caboose, and found a side alley where she could open the magical doorway without being noticed. A few moments later, they stumbled out before the lit-up gates of the Palace, the festivities clearly proceeding unabated inside, and she shot a small spell at the guards to make them pivot in opposite directions like a pair of nutcrackers. Nutcrackers – that pricked at something in her memory, some wisp of something, a winter night in Prague – but she didn't have time to recollect the rest of it. They ran through, up the steps, under the chandeliered foyer, and into the ballroom beyond.

At once, a tide of sensory overload hit them from all sides: heat and light, the valiant sawing of the orchestra, the hum of cognoscenti conversation in half a dozen European languages, white-gloved butlers weaving expertly through the rush to offer a glass of champagne or a delicately adorned truffle. Ambassadors strutted like peacocks with chests full of medals, while great ladies flirted and fluttered behind decoupage fans. At the front, the short, stout, matronly figure of the Queen held pride of place – Victoria having put aside her customary black mourning for the occasion, gowned instead in brilliant crimson taffeta. The aether lamps sparkled on the fat diamonds of her state crown, and a serving boy was just sidling up, bowing all the while, to offer her a drink. Victoria reached for it, and Emma put on a burst of speed, flinging herself across the final space between them. "Your Majesty, no!"

Victoria looked up, startled, just as Emma tackled the serving boy and sent the drink spinning to the floor in a shriek of shattered crystal. The landing hurt considerably, as it would smashing elderly bones into solid marble, and she wondered if she'd broken her hip. Still, she gathered herself enough to roll over and gasp, "No. Your Majesty, don't. There is – there is a plot against your life."

The Queen stared at her, blinking like a small and stunned owl – though in and of itself this news could not have been remarkable; she had survived enough assassination attempts in her earlier days for the press to make something of a running joke of it. "Lady Emma? What on earth is the meaning of this? We are confused."

"I know," Emma panted, pushing herself to hands and knees with a grimace, even as Killian darted in to lift her up, holding onto her waist. "Tonight – they – the Prime Minister. He means to have you dead."

An aghast gasp followed these words, followed by an uneasy hush. The elite of Britain had never trusted Jafar, but they had also had no choice – when _had_ he become Prime Minister? Apparently never, if the tale Killian was telling was true. This was some twisted magical deviation of his, a plot to seize supreme power, and it had come very close to succeeding, if it hadn't already. "Jafar?" spluttered one assorted luminary, some earl or duke or something of the sort, almost popping his monocle and spitting out his cigar. "How dare he think to – "

Victoria's lips went thinner than usual, but her voice remained calm. "What evidence do you have of this, Lady Emma?"

"I know because I – " Wincing, fighting the stabbing pains that kept traveling up her left leg, Emma steadied herself with Killian's help. "I was supposed to be part of it. Your Majesty, I don't know, I can't explain it myself, but – this isn't how things are supposed to be. Jafar has altered time somehow, manipulated all of us like pieces on a chessboard. Tell me, when did he become Prime Minister?"

Victoria, looking indignant, opened her mouth – then closed it, frowning. "Be that as it may, we do not understand why you have ambushed us in such a – "

At that moment, a second horrified murmur circled the ballroom, as the doors flew open and a ragged, limping, bloodied figure stumbled in from the night, the masses drawing back as if at the parting of the Red Sea. "Your Majesty!" Jafar's impeccably sleek black curls had come loose, frizzed and soot-stained, as he lurched forward and fell to his knees before the queen, pressing her beringed hand humbly to his lips. "Oh, tell me that I am not too late!"

Victoria shot a baffled glance at Emma, then back at Jafar. Belatedly, she recovered herself enough to speak. "Prime Minister, what is the meaning of this?"

"Only that I beg you, do not trust her." Jafar raised a hand and pointed directly at Emma, damning as the sword of Damocles. "We all know what she is. A liar, a thief, an assassin, who has seen more men into an early grave than one would care to count. It is only by Providence that I myself have escaped an attempt on my life tonight – as you can see." He indicated the shambles of his frock coat, the blood running down from a deep gash on his temple. "We were at supper, myself and the ministers of your Cabinet, the Fellows of the Royal Society, when. . . please, please do hurry. Send the fire brigade. Some of them may still be alive under there."

Victoria went pale. She seemed to be searching for the right words when Emma pulled herself free of Killian's protective embrace. Took a step, winced again, but her leg held up. Slowly and methodically as one of the automaton soldiers that had been in production, a weapon that Jafar promised could win all of the world's wars without another loss of a human life, she advanced across the floor toward him. "You."

"Stop!" With commendable theatricality, Jafar threw up both hands, cowering as if in actual fear of her. "Come no nearer, witch!"

Emma almost laughed. She shucked back her tight sleeves, stripped off her lacy evening gloves. Could almost glimpse whatever it was she was supposed to remember, could almost see. Not quite – but enough, and she would trust Killian for the rest of it. "This ends. Now."

"There is no end to your brazenry. Threatening me before the Queen, before the entire court, on the occasion of her New Year's party, when your foul designs almost succeeded in murdering me?" Jafar rolled back his cuffs as well, flexing his fingers in their black leather gloves. "And oh my – what is this? A pirate? Guards! Seize him!"

At once, several red-jacketed stalwarts broke off and started forward – then stopped in their tracks as Killian drew his sword with a ringing scrape, turning in a slow, deliberate circle. "I don't want to hurt any of you," he informed them. "So don't come any closer."

"Stop this at _once!"_ Victoria looked bug-eyed at the effrontery, the way her cultured soiree was quickly devolving into mayhem. "We are most displeased with _all_ of you – see if we don't – "

"Terribly sorry, Your Majesty." Jafar almost did look truly penitent. "But the Black Swan is right. This does, in fact, end."

And with that, fast as a striking cobra, he flung out both hands, pushing a titanic, broiling current of magic in front of him – but Emma had been watching him, intent for the slightest change, and she shifted stances, threw out her own hands, and blocked it, countering fast enough that Jafar actually had to duck. She could feel the pulsating golden current sizzling through her bones, imbued with an elegance and a strength it had never had before. _You made a mistake,_ she thought at him. _You made me too powerful, and you tried to make me serve you. But you're wrong. You won't. You can't. You need me, and now, I rise._

They traded blows almost too fast for the naked eye to follow, the heat and crackle of competing magical currents growing stronger and stronger, shattering and reverberating, until Emma could almost grasp the memory of another sorcerer's duel – at another party, this one in Monaco, between Jafar and someone else – Gold? But that was a distraction, and not one she could afford. She needed all her attention on the clash, drawing on every drop of magic she knew, every sort of arcane spellwork, blocking and parrying, the two of them all but completely evenly matched. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Killian trying to get the party guests out of range, lessening the chances that one of them would catch an errant fatal blow upside the head. Yet no matter how much he pulled at her, Victoria remained rooted to the spot, watching the duel with almost mesmeric attention. It must indeed be something, to understand at last the true nature of the vipers you had taken to your bosom.

Emma could feel her arms starting to tremble, her shields no longer as quick and well-crafted as before. If she was even ten years younger, she could have kept this up all night, but she was, after all, over seventy, and the pain radiating from her smashed hip was making her nauseous. She had to duck one of Jafar's assaults and then another, smashing in lethal fractures across the marble; it caught a page boy and felled him immediately. No – she had to keep this contained, couldn't risk accidentally assassinating half of London. Had to.

With one final glance back at Killian to assure herself he was still alive, Emma threw all her effort into a detonation sphere – expanding outwards in a rush, eating up light and noise and motion and time itself, until she and Jafar were face to face, no more than a few feet apart, as the world froze solid around them, and an eerie hush descended. The golden-fire edges of her sphere oscillated and quivered as she fought to keep it whole, as she advanced on Jafar and spread her arms. "I bring my hands together," she panted, "this crushes you. Unless – you give me – the compass."

"Oh?" Jafar was out of breath as well, struggling to maintain his usual suave demeanor, but at this, he managed a gasping chuckle. "That's what this is about, my dear? This?"

With that, he reached into the breast pocket of his torn jacket and pulled it out, dangling on its chain, somewhat scuffed and cracked but otherwise operable. "You want this, do you?" he went on. "Your only hope of finding your way back to your own reality, and not being trapped forever in this one? An old woman with nothing and no one to live for?"

"Yes." Emma forced her hands together, constricting the sphere, and Jafar grimaced as he began to feel the pressure of it, bending and warping dimensions inward, down to a core of absolute nothing. He couldn't conjure a competing one, already trapped inside this one, and Emma's heart lurched with mad, wild hope. "Now," she repeated. "Give it. And I'll – spare – your – life."

Jafar laughed. "Spare my life?" He was perspiring freely with the effort of holding off the sphere, flickering hungrily around his legs. "That's what you'll do?"

"Yes."

"Very well." He held out the compass, flat in his palm. "Take it."

Emma hesitated, certain that it couldn't, wouldn't be this simple – but at the same time, desperate to believe that it was, would be. She reached for it – let her attention slip from the sphere for the barest moment –

Quick and deadly as a panther, Jafar sprang, battling through the unfocused, deadly magic of the detonation, and slammed her arms together, so the center lost hold and crumpled into nothing, tearing through the fabric of the world down past absolute zero, into blackness and unbeing. Then he threw the compass into the void, and Emma's heart shriveled into a freezing fist as she could do nothing but watch it plunge. In another instant the nothing caught hold of it, and it did not merely explode – it was wiped from existence altogether, as if it had never been.

" _NO!"_ Emma did not know if that was her, if she'd thought it, if she'd spoken it aloud – if it was merely the universe itself screaming out its defiance, as her last chance of returning to her old life disappeared before her eyes. The weight of her years crashed down on her, the knowledge of losing Henry forever, of losing Killian – of never even having a chance to find her family, as all at once the memories avalanched loose. Lady Regina and the enchanted, sleeping people in her vault, Killian's insistence that they were hers – Elsa, Prague, Will Scarlet, the contract she had signed binding her to Gold, the zeppelin, Neal, Jafar murdering him, the shadow world and Blackbeard –

Gone. Gone. _Gone._ It screamed through her, twisting like a frozen blade. She fell, the abyss still roaring and sucking eagerly just a few feet from her, and the detonation sphere went out with a sound like a thunderclap. She landed on her back, skidding in a streak of blood across the marble, silver hair haloed around her. She lay inert, beaten, broken, an old woman waiting for the end, without even the strength for one last defiance.

Gasping and coughing himself, pressing his pocket handkerchief to a spreading crimson wound in his side, Jafar limped toward her. His eyes were utterly inhuman, as if they reflected the gate into the netherworld that still stood open, sucking in party favors and ladies' shawls and spare bits of detritus, black tendrils curling out eagerly in search of more prey. If it was not stopped, if it was not closed, it would devour everything, collapse the entire foundations of the world in on itself – but she couldn't. It was over. Done. She'd fought and fought, and lost.

"Good people of Great Britain," Jafar announced, spreading his arms wide to encompass the huddled, silent masses – no longer frozen by the detonation sphere's time-stopping effects, but as motionless as if they were. "Please do behold, once and for all, the fate of traitors."

With no further ado, he raised his hands, preparing for the death blow. Emma could only watch and wait for it, merely waiting for it to crash down on her and for it all to end. But then, the swirling black maw of the abyss did something strange. It twisted, quivered, and contorted on itself, as if trying desperately to spit out something roiling in its innards. And it occurred to Emma in a mad flash that if the compass, when Jafar tossed it into the nothing, had guided itself back exactly where it was supposed to go –

She had no further time to consider the ramifications, because at that moment, with an echoing, rendering explosion, the blackness tore apart and something huge, something monstrous, lumbered out. Emma's dazzled eyes could not register, could only take in the sense of enormity – until she saw the misshapen clay head brushing against the high ceiling of the ballroom, breaking off chandeliers that tumbled like falling stars, spraying crystalline Faberge droplets everywhere. Had a sense of ice and snow whirling past it. _The golem._ The creature of clay and blood that Jafar had woken in Prague, that they had tried to stop but not in time. If it was here now, if the compass had torn straight back through to their original reality –

Emma propped herself on an elbow, coughing blood, staring in disbelief as a tiny, slender figure appeared behind the golem, driving it on, the whirls of winter howling and swirling around her. _Elsa._ Elsa must have seized control of the beast, and when the portal opened, driven it through. The two competing realities were grinding against each other like ships too closely anchored, buckling plate and popping rivets, until one of them would be snuffed out for good. And so –

Finding some last reserve of strength, Emma staggered to her feet. "ELSA!" She battled her way through the tempest, closer and closer, feeling the pull of the altering realities on her – she could look down and see her hands aged and wrinkled one moment, then smooth and young the next, as her frail mortal body struggled not to be torn apart by the power of the elemental forces, trying to take into account who she was supposed to be in each of the timelines. _"ELSA!"_

The Queen of Norway looked up, saw her, and stared as if visited by a ghost. But she wasted no more time, flinging out her hand, and Emma snatched it, feeling a flare of power jolt through her. She joined it to her own, and the two of them held tightly as the magic scoured in waves through the darkened ballroom, the outlines of Buckingham Palace itself beginning to warp and distort and bend in, like the false reality – Killian's memory – that she had freed herself and him from in the depths of St. Vitus Cathedral. Killian – where was he, _where was he?_ But she couldn't look, couldn't do anything except focusing on driving the golem on, advancing step by thunderous step toward the lone figure of Jafar. _Take him. Take. Him._

Jafar raised his arms over his face, trying frantically to work a defensive spell against the beast that he himself had brought to life, but the tendrils of abyss clinging to the golem kept snuffing it out. The clay giant reached him, swept one three-fingered hand out, and lifted him kicking into the air, hauling him back toward the open gate, as Emma and Elsa ran after them. The closer they got, the more Emma could feel herself pulled and reshaped like warm clay, melting back to who she was supposed to be – but she didn't know if she was strong enough to pass through and emerge alive on the other side. _Killian. Killian! Killian! Where are you? Where are you?_

Everything beyond their immediate vicinity was a blur, but she thought she could see an indistinct black shape, running toward the gate with them. _I'm not going home without you._ She took as much of her power away from the control of the golem as she dared, reaching out to ensnare the figure – pulled it close, wrapped them all up together as the palace began to collapse in earnest, and jumped.

* * *

The ground rocked and shivered and shook. The stone fell in thudding chunks of dust and mortar. The palace groaned and shifted and kept on collapsing, the rubble blocking out the stars, as Anna, Robin, Regina, and Henry stared at the scene of absolute destruction, the whirling void of nothing that had opened up when the compass came tumbling through. It was as if time had started again, as if they had been frozen in place, awake but not awake – until then. Perihelion. The moment of creation, of salvation – or utter and complete destruction.

When at last the thundering stopped, silence reigned absolute, louder and louder and louder until it was almost crushing as the tumult had been. They stared at the debris, desperate to know who if anyone was underneath it, if Elsa had made it to the alternate timeline and back – if she had found Emma and Killian, if it was a mad gamble, if Jafar had escaped, and now was stronger than ever. But there was no sign of life. Nothing anywhere.

Nobody said a word. They could not. Remained motionless, entranced. Until they heard a crunch behind them, and then another, as in footsteps. Turned all at once, and beheld a strange apparition, clothed in trailing linen bandages like an Egyptian mummy escaped from the tomb, pulling them off his face and swearing with every step, until he noticed them and seemed as stunned to see them as they were him. Chips of clay cracked off his boots, but he himself was flesh and bone. Came to a halt and stared, rubbing his eyes as if to be sure they did not mislead him after days of disuse – but in fact, they did not.

"Jesus organ-grinding Christ," Will Scarlet said, surveying the wreckage. _"What_ the bloody hell did I miss?"


	26. Chapter 26

Once upon a time, for a few years when she was a child, Emma had lived in the small coastal town of Blackpool with a woman named Ingrid. It was not her first time out of the Church of England orphanage where she had grown up – living in fear of the matron's switch and spending endless hours on her knees scrubbing floors or blacking stoves, watching her companions die of typhoid or consumption, occasionally marched out in starched pinafores to parade before some concerned middle-class citizen and his prim, stout wife, who might take one of the girls and then never be seen again – but she prayed every night it would be the last. Ingrid was a Scandinavian immigrant who made her livelihood catering to the rich tourists who came to take the air at Blackpool, to bathe in its cold North Atlantic waves (a capital cure for all manner of ills) and promised that when she had saved enough, they would move to London and be a real family. She told Emma tales of living in Norway on the Lofoten peninsula, where she had been an aether farmer – collecting the magical golden dust during the storms, barreling it up, and selling it to the steamships that traded the island routes. She made what must have been a cold, lonely, dangerous life sound so exciting that Emma often wondered why she had left at all, and when she asked Ingrid about it, her foster mother turned evasive. Merely an old story, she said. Nothing Emma would be terribly interested in, nothing that mattered any more.

Emma had been so eager not to jeopardize Ingrid's promise, the glamorous life in London they would soon have, that she never pressed the question. Had worked in the boarding house Ingrid ran, even harder than she had in the orphanage, for she knew that this time it would be repaid. Began to save money herself, a groat or a sixpence or even a shilling she found or that an indulgent customer gave her, told her to go buy a sweetie on the piers. She'd pay for it, she'd do her part, anything. Her faith and trust had still been boundless, then. Until the night Ingrid told her that she was special, and to prove it, tried to kill her. Shoved her out into the path of a runaway carriage. Emma, terrified, had done the only thing she could: dived for cover as the heavy coach-and-six thundered past, narrowly avoiding turning her to red ruin on the paving stones. Then ran again, in full as much fear of her life, as Ingrid pleaded with her to come back, to listen, to understand. _Emma! Don't you know who you really are? Emma! Emma, please!_

At last, after so long thinking the woman merely mistaken or deranged, this began to fall together in shards of clarity, clear and cold as Elsa's icicles. _Did she know? Did she know that I was the princess of the fae world, sent through a wardrobe to England, raised an orphan, gave my son over to the woman who held my entire family magically hostage? That Regina was manipulated by Gold into casting a terrible curse, destroying this place, this life, for his own ends? If I listened to her – if I believed her – would she have explained this to me, brought me home? Or used me for herself as well?_

Emma's head reeled in endless circles, just below the surface of consciousness, bereft of answers or solace. The old wound of Ingrid's betrayal felt freshly ripped open again, and nothing else was safe refuge from her own memories. She _thought_ she had undone the alternate universe Jafar had created, defeated his final play for absolute power with help from the timely appearance of Elsa and the golem, and made it back to her original reality, but she could not be certain. Was Killian here, was he alive? She could still remember the life, false as it might have been, that she had spent as the Black Swan, the Prime Minister's hired assassin. Remembered watching Killian be hanged at Execution Dock, even if he hadn't. Remembered receiving the telegram about Henry's death in South Africa, even if he wasn't. Remembered all those years. Remembered not least, a torrid and devouring physical affair with the pirate that made her blush even in its illusion. _Were we lovers? Will we be? Or is it merely something I am cursed to believe, unable to know true from false?_ How could she still know the taste of him on her lips, the feel of him inside her, hands clawing, backs arched, a raw and insatiable chemistry of passion that drove them into bed yet ran far deeper, if it was only Jafar's mnemonic meddling?

She did not know. She could not tell. She whirled in empty space like a fleck of interstellar dust, shed from a passing comet, too far from its true home to ever be pulled back, sentenced to wander for infinity, and then all of eternity beyond. Could just let go now, if she wanted, and burn. Run one last time, and for good. Away. Safe. Into darkness, abyss, apotheosis. Never have to try, and never have to fear – loss, and breaking, and love. The ultimate refuge, beyond walls so high that no mortal hand could sunder them. A princess in a tower, yet no dragon would be needed to keep her in.

Death. Darkness. Unmaking.

Day one.

_Wake up, Emma._

_Wake up._

The soft grey nothingness around her was cohering into shape and form, light falling against her closed eyelids. She had a sensation as if she was rising, and one odder still that she was being born, traveling from the womb of nothing into the world of being. As if she had never been before who she would become when she surfaced – and indeed, she would not. Shaped with the knowledge of destiny, with a battle against darkness both external and internal, with memories of a life she had never lived and yet which belonged to her all the same. And something else, almost too delicate and gauzy to be touched, a veil that might be ripped at an injudicious word or a careless gesture, but which laid something soft and kind over a world that had been nothing but sharp edges and shattered dreams. The usual word seemed barely sufficient to describe it, yet so it was. So it was.

Something soft and wet was falling on her face.

Emma Swan opened her eyes.

For a long moment, this constituted absolutely no improvement over her previous unconscious state, as all she could see were faint blurs of black and grey, yet she shortly discovered that the wetness was the deluge of a good old-fashioned London rainstorm. She was sprawled in the middle of a pile of wrecked stones and mortar, skirts bedraggled and braid undone, arms and legs stained with mud, as if the gods of the storm had negligently cast her down alongside the drops. Yet as she squinted at her hands, she could see that they were no longer aged and arthritic, and the damp hair spilling wildly in her eyes was blonde, not silver. She was back at the proper age, and so her last-chance jump through time and space had worked. Or had it?

Feeling something gritty beneath her fingers, Emma frowned and rubbed them together, leaving a rich streak of mud. She stared at it in bafflement, until it sparked a sudden connection in her jumbled brain, and she whirled around – then got a horrible start as she looked directly at the monstrous, misshapen lump of the golem's head. Or rather, what remained of it. It had been broken into a thousand pieces, rugged hide seamed with deep cracks like those in a dried-up streambed, and the clumsy animate intelligence had gone out, the carved eyeball nothing more than a lump of clay. She hesitated, then crawled on hands and knees toward it, reached into its gaping mouth, and pulled out the _shem._

The enchanted parchment hissed and writhed, blood-inked letters vanishing into nothingness even as Emma watched, and then it itself curled up and withered to dust, washed from her hands altogether by the continuing downpour. So it was true, then. The golem had been destroyed – did that mean its stolen life force had been returned to those it had taken from, and that perhaps, Will Scarlet had returned from the other side of the veil as well? Not that Emma knew if she had really been dead, not in the same way, but it felt as if, however briefly, she had.

 _Killian._ That was the next, and only, thought that had any importance. She struggled to her feet and clambered over the rubble, trying not to think what might happen if she hadn't managed to bring him back with her. _Where is he? Where?_ Her throat felt strangled, as if she couldn't even call out, but she forced her voice past it. "Hook? Hook!"

She heard an answering hail from the far side of the teetering debris pile, and ducked around it, heart hammering. Whereupon she went almost prostrate with relief to lay eyes on the pirate captain, blood running down his face and black leather torn, but otherwise more or less intact, grimly holding a pistol on a remarkably disheveled Jafar. Far from his usual impeccably tailored self, the sorcerer looked ragged, rained-on, and ruffled, cravat gone and curls uncombed, eyeing Killian with blackest disdain but apparently not yet having made a move to overpower him. If it was possible that the return journey had knocked his power source free, if he had no magic –

Desperately tempting as it was, Emma refused to leap to conclusions. Where she rather more wanted to leap, in fact, was into Killian's arms, but restrained, not least because she wanted no interruption on the surveillance of Jafar. Instead she swallowed, ducking her head awkwardly and clasping her hands. "Captain. I – I'm glad you're safe."

She caught the flash of disappointment and pain in his face, followed by a decision that he should have expected nothing else, and that as far as he was aware, she had no feelings for him beyond perhaps a compatriot-in-arms regard for someone fighting the same battle against the Royal Society. Which made her wonder – what _was_ the present state of that venerable institution? Jafar had forced Gold's resignation on the airship just before he murdered Neal, but to say the least, it was uncertain whether such blackmail backroom manipulations still held sway. Where was Gold, and where were the rest of them? It appeared they had landed in real-world London rather than back in the shadow palace, and therefore presumably Anna, Regina, Robin, and Henry were still there. And Elsa – where was she?

Glancing up at the sky, Emma could see that it was still raining, not snowing, which meant that if Elsa _was_ here, her powers at least were not running out of control. She had just opened her mouth to call for her when there was a rustling and a crunching, and a dainty slippered foot appeared from the detritus, shortly followed by the bruised and battered Queen of Norway. Upon seeing them, her big blue eyes went even bigger, and she rushed across the mud to Emma. "Oh, you're safe! I'm so grateful!"

Caught off guard, and not expecting to be embraced so vehemently, Emma nonetheless hugged her. "How on earth – how did you possibly call the golem? And get through to us?"

"It was pure luck. I didn't have anything to do with it." Elsa looked self-effacingly at her feet. "The compass fell through back to where we were, and I think Jafar was trying to summon the golem anyway, to join him in his new reality. Once the compass tore open a portal, it was supposed to just step through to him, but I intervened, and managed to take control of it instead." She shrugged, clearly having no idea of the titanically complex and difficult magic she had just performed – leaping into an abyss with a monster, to a collapsing reality and crazed sorcerer on the other side – in order to save Emma and Killian's lives. "I didn't know if I'd come back, but it was. . . worth the risk."

Emma opened her mouth, shut it, then gently touched Elsa's shoulder, and the two women shared a small smile. But at that moment, there was a low, rasping chuckle from behind them. "What a succinct assessment of the situation, my dear, if surely far too humble. Indeed, you are wasted as a queen, charming chinless diplomats and haggling over dry trade agreements and whatever else they see fit to lumber you with. You would have done far better taking a lesson from me."

Elsa stiffened. "After you kidnapped me and meant to kill me, to transfer my power to the golem so that it would be invincible? Mark my words, I will not 'take a lesson' from you, now or ever."

Jafar shrugged. "Have it your way. What do you mean to do with me instead, then? You, the Black Swan, and our dear and _oh_ so trustworthy Captain all hold me hostage, powerless and defeated. I have done such terrible things. Don't you want to kill me?"

Elsa was clearly tempted, but irresolute. "Your crimes merit it."

"Oh, I know." Jafar negligently flicked the dust off his filthy smoking jacket. "Heinous. So much that the nursemaids of Britain will still be frightening its children with tales of me half a century hence. Surely you could not be blamed if you sped me off to the Tower and a date with some unpleasant method of execution. It is quite what dear Robert would do, after all."

"We're not him," Killian growled. "In case it slipped your notice."

"Actually, it did. What with you pointing a gun at my head." Jafar continued brushing himself off, spitting on his pocket handkerchief and using it to vigorously buffer away the larger soot stains on his face. "But make no mistake, I do congratulate you. You have proved yourself more than worthy adversaries, destroyed my golem, undone my preferred reality, and have me here with no more magic than some common boot-black. Yet out there, Robert Gold is still on the loose, and once he discovers this, will seize the opportunity to exact terrible revenge on us all. Some altruistic, high-minded notion of forgiveness shall serve you exactly as much as a ripe fart in the wind. Decline to kill him, and he shall happily kill you. Mercy is no good in this situation. You must finish the fight, and for that, you require my services."

"No."

"I wouldn't disagree so swiftly, my dear." Jafar flashed a predatory smile. "Let us speak frankly. You know what I can do. You have seen me utterly scrub the floor with that awful little beast, and you know that he is already arranging a way to kill your dearest pirate, you, and everyone else he can get his hands on, especially now that I inconveniently exposed his crimes against the fae world and how his curse left it in blasted ruins. That was your kingdom he was depredating, don't forget. And you must also know that as soon as I get my hands on some aether again, I could either classify you as an enemy to be ruthlessly dealt with, or an ally whose interests are highly prized. Which side do you want to fall on? This is an unprecedented offer. Safety assured, for yourself and your loved ones. Come now, Miss Swan." He held out a hand. "Let us be business partners."

"After you've openly admitted to me in the past that you say anything needed to get your victims to swallow the bait, then do with them as you please? Do you think I'm a complete _idiot?_ You'd use us to get your powers back, then kill us. I said no."

Killian's finger tightened on the trigger. "Give the word then, love."

Jafar raised both hands, slowly, as if not to alarm the pirate into doing something intemperate. "Miss Swan, indeed, your apt recall serves you well. I cannot deny uttering words quite to that effect, and generally have made it a policy of doing so. Yet people of my sort – myself included, I most humbly confess my error – always fall prey to the idea that we must accomplish our aims alone, and that the rest of the world is either too dull or too evil to realize the truth of them without force. But would we not agree that my gambit to do just that has been defeated, rather decisively so, simply because you all teamed up to work against me? I am not a stupid man, and you know that I am worth a great deal more alive than dead. Change is always possible. I have hurt you all, I know, but I can help you now. Why does the pirate receive your trust and affection, and yet it is so unthinkable that I could do the same? Please. Let me join you."

Emma glanced uncertainly at Killian. Until this, he had appeared steadfast in his desire to just put a bullet through Jafar's head and have done with it, but now he no longer looked so sure. Then after a moment, he lowered the pistol, thumbed the round out of the chamber, and holstered it. "He's right, love," he said quietly. "I can't stand here and kill him, as if I was so much better a man. I've done plenty of terrible things. If I merit forgiveness, perhaps he does as well."

"Why, thank you, Captain," Jafar said graciously, getting to his feet. "My intuition of you as a man of cardinal good sense, and a prime partner in our business venture, is confirmed. Indeed may I remark that – "

He was cut off, however, as Killian's hook shot out, snagged in his lapel, and twisted, drawing the two men together until their faces were only inches apart. "Listen closely," the pirate said, in a voice of lethal silk and steel. "Forgiveness does not mean I am letting my guard down, or taking my eyes off you a moment, _mate._ Put one bloody toe out of line, raise one finger against Emma, and I _will_ kill you like a dog in the gutter. Do you understand me?"

"Quite well indeed, my good sir." Jafar deferentially untangled himself. "Of course, I could not hope for you to begin to believe me without the most substantial demonstrations of my sincerity. Hence first on the ledger, we should find a way to return to the fae world and collect the half of the party we left behind. Supplying me with fresh magic would be most beneficial to achieving that. If you don't want me to feed upon either of our present savants – " he divided a nod and a correct bow between Emma and Elsa – "a quantity of aether would be advisable. As well as finding some there, the fae world would be most easily available to us through its connection to this one: the Night Market. So then, my dear people. Why don't you take me there?"

A long pause as Elsa, Emma, and Killian communally racked their brains for alternatives. None presented itself.

"Very well," Emma said through clenched teeth, and forced a smile. "Why don't we?"

* * *

It was a monumental chore to escape from the blasted rubble without attracting the notice of the Metropolitan Police, and into the cold, dim London streets. Emma was keen to find a way into the remains of the Market that did not involve going via Westminster Abbey, as the last thing she wanted was for Jafar to have a renewed chance to sniff around the Chair and Stone, but she knew there was a passage there, and they couldn't waste time toddling around the city in search of another one: ordinary Market keys were, after all, now no good. So, glancing suspiciously over her shoulder for any sign of funny business, she snuck them under the shadows of the great gothic portico, across the soot-stained floorstones, and to the door that she, Robin, and Will had jumped through when the latter two rescued her. A little careful magic later, they were in, proceeding cautiously single file (Emma, Jafar, Killian, Elsa) into the subterranean warren that led to the Market's spectral domains.

A few minutes of silent trekking later, a torch flared ahead of them, followed by the brisk materialization of Little John and his crossbow. Evidently even with his leader gone, the big Merry Man was punctiliously guarding the precincts, and to say that he was agog to see Jafar was the understatement of the century. It took some doing, but they finally persuaded him to let them pass, and Jafar strolled into the dismal underground cavern and peered about with an aesthete's critical eye. "Miserably cold, dark, dank, and putrid. How on earth do you lot live like this?"

"Do you think it was our choice?" Little John growled. "After your friend Gold destroyed it, we didn't – "

Jafar turned on him with a smile that punched his words back down his throat to his stomach. "Please, never insult me by calling that individual my friend again. I daresay I hate him far more than you do – and unlike you, my obese and hirsute compatriot, have the means to make my displeasure rather more concretely known. Or will, as soon as someone supplies me with some aether. You _do_ have some stashed somewhere, don't you?"

Little John eyed him with the rankest mistrust, but finally consented to send one of the others off, to return with a vial of the glowing golden dust. Jafar sighed in ecstasy, flipped the top open, and poured it into a small container in his enameled snake-head cufflinks, spilling not a single fleck, then screwed it shut, flexing his fingers. "Ah. _So_ much better. Now, first order of business – "

He made a careless, elegant gesture, and conjured several globe-sized orbs of warm yellow light, which gave off heat as well like miniature suns, and bobbed up to the roof of the cavern to beam on the huddled stragglers below. With a second flick, he produced a banquet table laden with fresh, hot food, and with a third, clean bandages and jars of medicine, washboards and cakes of soap, and bowls of steaming water. Regarding the stunned looks on the faces of his audience, he shrugged. "If Robert Gold would have you live in misery, squalor, and fear, barely better than beasts, the least I can do is thwart him in that. I do possess a humanitarian impulse, you see. Unless you will accept no gifts from me at all?"

"I – no, leave it," Little John said hurriedly, as the Market refugees, after staring and blinking in disbelief, began to fall upon the bounty like starving wolves. "That was. . . kind."

"Indeed. Perhaps you don't actually know me at all." With a final toothsome smile, Jafar turned to Emma. "Your Highness, would you have me create the doorway?"

"I – what did you call me?"

"Why, only your proper title. So long as we are in the fae world or its territories, you after all are the princess, rightful heir to its crown. Another of Robert Gold's outrages to be avenged. I can help with that. Name me your vizier, your arch-chancellor, and you and I shall raise this place to such heights of grandeur as can barely be fathomed. The shadow and gloom is only a lingering aftereffect of the curse. We can chase it away. The fae world will regain its legendary beauty, and the Night Market will wonder and enthrall for centuries to come." He touched her lightly, just below the collarbone. "Let me show you."

Emma stepped away, conscious of Killian's baleful stare burning holes through them. "Open the portal," she said coolly.

Jafar nodded, flourished a bow, and sketched a complicated pattern in the air, until the shape of a door took form, grew, and shimmered into solid reality. He pulled it open, and bowed again. "After you, Your Highness?"

Emma had no intention of walking into whatever horrible place Jafar had possibly created alone, and reached out instinctively, hand fumbling until it found Killian's, and grasping hard. Together, they teetered on the brink, then stepped through.

A sensation of considerable, distorting pressure later, along with a brief and terrifying instant of utter disembodiment, they emerged in a dark meadow, with the crumbled ruins of another palace directly ahead, hulking out the horizon. Emma was just trying to decide if it looked like the one they had been inside in the first place, when there was a small popping sound and Elsa and Jafar winked into existence, the latter turning around to seal the portal behind them. "There," he said with satisfaction, dusting off his hands. "I do believe this was the location – and to speak of the devil, who are those?"

A small group of dark figures a few hundred yards away, having taken notice of the magically transported new arrivals, were hastening closer – and then in a few moments more, were revealed as Anna, Regina, Robin, and Henry, all wearing looks of shock and relief. But there was one other person hurrying behind them, flapping long tails of loose linen wrapping, and it wasn't – it couldn't be –

" _Will!"_ Elsa, forgetting all queenly dignity whatsoever, sprinted the last distance between them and flung herself into his arms – while he, looking flabbergasted, hastily tried to hitch up his bandages and hug her at the same time. She grasped his face in both hands and kissed him, to which he plainly had no objection whatsoever, then nuzzled herself against his chest, smiling as tears ran down her cheeks. "You're – you're back! You're alive! H-how?"

"Bit puzzled on that meself," Will said frankly. "Woke up in some horrible little closet wrapped in loo-paper, figured I'd had a particularly awful night of drinking, then remembered. Went out, down the Mile to the World's End – just had some sort of intuition that was guidin' me. Then down the steps to the cellar, stepped through the open door, and – " He shrugged. "Here I was. Don't ask me nothin' else, I've got no bloody clue. Oh, and I see you there, Jones. Aren't you going to give me an 'I'm so happy you're alive' kiss too?"

Killian, who looked either stunned to be called upon or still just stunned from Will's appearance, rubbed his hand across his face, blinked hard, then moved forward to give his resurrected confrere what looked to be a manly clap on the back, but which changed halfway through into an unexpectedly sincere embrace. They held on a moment longer, then Killian stepped back. "Good to have you around again, Scarlet, though I'll regret saying that in five minutes. Nice outfit."

Elsa looked miffed, as after all Will's current coverings were a result of her careful work aboard the _Queen Anne's Revenge_ to preserve his clay body, but before she could bring this up, Will let out a yelp and shoved her behind him. "Bloody hell! What's he doing here?"

Everyone spun around – including Emma, who had been hugging Henry tightly, in the first time she had ever felt comfortable displaying affection to him. Thus the object of their communal attention, Jafar spread his hands benevolently. "Please do not be alarmed. I am on your side now."

Regina stared at him with slitted eyes, then whirled on Emma. "Was this _your_ idea, Miss Swan? To take the word of this – of this – "

"Mine," Killian cut in shortly. "So shout at me, not her, aye?"

Regina looked as if she was thinking about it, but settled for mulish silence, shaking her head in apparent utter disbelief of their naïveté. Her sentiments were clearly seconded by Will, who demanded loudly, "Am I missin' something here? The bloke is bloody mental!"

Jafar raised a dark eyebrow. "Oh? Well, I shall refrain from any impolite adages about the pot and the kettle, Mr. Scarlet, and merely solve your present sartorial dilemma."

With that and a quick snap of his fingers, Will's unraveling bandages vanished, to be replaced with a sharply cut suit of fine broadcloth, a stylish cravat, and a golden watch chain looped across the watered-silk waistcoat. Indeed, it was clearly the nicest set of clothing Will had ever worn in his life, and he opened his mouth, noticed Elsa looking at him admiringly, and smartly bit back whatever remark he had been about to offer.

"Well then," Jafar continued, since nobody else appeared about to take the initiative. "There is so much to do. Your Majesty – " this to Elsa – "perhaps a return trip to Norway is in order, so I can set to rights any damage that I caused by my ill-advised kidnapping of you. Oh and – " this to Anna – "I was regrettably forced to knock out your husband, or at least I assume that is the identity of the pungently smelling blonde gentleman who talked to reindeer. We should certainly assure ourselves that he is all right."

Anna blinked, then frowned fiercely. "If you actually hurt Kristoff _or_ Sven, I'll – "

"Please, my dear, please." Jafar smiled charmingly around at the group. "Are we ready, then? I almost imagine that this is what being a father feels like. It quite tugs my heartstrings."

Regina scoffed. "You think we're _following_ you?"

"I certainly do not expect you to permit me to go alone," Jafar pointed out, with a certain damning logic. "As I have lately been elucidating the others, Robert Gold is on the loose somewhere, and the revenge he is concocting us for all is beyond anything any of us can possibly imagine. Including you, my lady – which reminds me." He glanced at Emma. "Your Highness, this is the woman who cast Gold's curse, entrapped your family into eternal slumber, got her claws into your son, and is the reason you had to grow up alone, miserable and unwanted. I only await your command to deal with her however you see fit. I suggest incineration."

Robin made a convulsive movement, and Jafar looked at him languidly. "Did you have an objection, Locksley?"

"Yes, in fact," Robin said tersely. "If we're letting _you_ live, nobody else is getting cut down in cold blood."

"Mercy seems to be contagious today. I do hope it isn't fatal." Jafar smiled. "And as it happens, your verdict is completely irrelevant, I was asking the princess. Your Highness?"

Emma felt as if a strangling vise had wrapped around her chest, as if she was falling into a long and dark and bottomless pit. The scared child, crying herself to sleep because she wanted her parents so badly, who did not understand how they could possibly give her up. The lost little girl who didn't matter and didn't think she ever would. She could order Jafar to kill Regina right now (assuming that he actually obeyed, that was). Avenge herself, and the parents she still did not know and might never. Burn away those decades of tribulation in blood and fire. The Black Swan was still there, waiting.

Become the killer that Jafar had turned her into, in the alternate reality. The one with no hope, no life, no light, nothing but death to console the abyss inside her, the hole where her heart had been. Once more, faced the choice that she had had at her waking. Could break, and fall. Or rise up, and fly.

Henry was at her side. Killian was at her back.

"No," Emma said hoarsely. Coughed, cleared her throat, and said it louder. "No. No killing. Whoever hurts Regina answers to me."

Jafar blinked, looking genuinely surprised – and perhaps for a moment, almost afraid. Then he shrugged, regained his sangfroid, and lowered his hand. "As you command, Your Highness. So then, to Norway?"

Was this salvation, or destruction? Was there any way to know, other than by somehow struggling forward, step by step, into a light that could blind or burn as soon as heal? No way to say. Could only do what was before them.

"Aye," Emma said, threaded her fingers into Killian's, and stared Jafar down. "To Norway."


	27. Chapter 27

The towering ice wall blockading Christiana harbor stretched from horizon to horizon, massive columns of blue-white glass that ate away the weak winter twilight and the stars alike, occasionally calving off equally immense bergs that crashed into the freezing water like the hammer of Thor and set the marooned ships rocking and thrashing at their anchor chains. It appeared to have grown even larger since being left to its own devices after Jafar and his minions kidnapped Elsa, and was starting to creep over the top of the fjords, strange sentinels of ice forming  on the cliffs and hanging sheaves of frozen daggers over the steep streets. Even the castle was starting to be overshadowed by it, a potent, silent warning. If Elsa did not melt it – thus reopening the way for the aether steamers to sail south and resume the trade with Britain, which had been the cause of her erecting it in the first place as a protest against the Royal Society's insatiably unfair customs dues and economic racketeering – it would keep on growing, soon burying the entire city in ice and killing them all. Jafar, after they had stepped out of the portal he had created from the Night Market and into the frigid wind of the Norwegian capital city, surveyed it with a critical eye and announced, "I'd take care of that now if I were you, my dear. Leave the protection of the aether to me. I assure you, Robert Gold will _not_ get his hands on it."

Elsa gave him an appropriately wintry look. "Yes, I'm sure you would safeguard the finest quality of our Norwegian mines for no other reason than altruism against our common enemy. I'm not sure quite how simple you think me, but you are wrong. In fact." She held out her hand. "I'll take that cufflink with your current supply in it. You've brought us here, there is no reason for you to require magic for the time being."

"Really?" Jafar raised an eyebrow. "That is rather ill-advised, Your Majesty. After he has lived with the aether for a long time, even a symbiont becomes organically bound to it – hence the very name _symbiont,_ describing magician and magic forming a deep attachment, so that the very existence of the one is knitted into the other. Taking it away from me now would be akin to withholding medicine from a sick man – or indeed, ripping out his heart. You are not so cruel."

"No, perhaps not," Elsa said. "But you are. When you poisoned me so that my own magic was meant to kill me without your antidote, and what you meant to do to all of us in that altered reality. This is not negotiable. Give it to me, now."

"Yeah," Will put in. "Give it to her now, or – " He cracked his knuckles, in what was apparently meant to be in a menacing fashion.

Jafar sighed deeply. "It would be an irreconcilable stain on my reputation if I were to be punched in the face by Will Scarlet in _any_ capacity," he murmured. "Not even twenty years of the most dazzling magic the world has ever seen could wipe out the shame. Very well, Your Majesty, I am willing to suffer for the cause if it should induce you to trust me." With that, he unclicked the cufflink containing the aether Little John had given him in the Night Market, and dropped it into Elsa's palm.

She closed her fingers tightly around it, and it was not there when she opened her hand. Then, with another blackly suspicious look at Jafar, she turned and began to lead their odd company up the streets toward the palace. Anna hurried ahead, clearly anxious to inquire after the fate of Kristoff and Sven, Robin, Regina, and Henry stayed closely together at the middle of the pack, and Emma and Killian came at the rear, still holding hands. She hadn't felt inclined to let go of him yet, and didn't know if that time would ever present itself in the immediate future. As a substitute for the words she couldn't say, couldn't get her tongue around how it had felt to lose him, it would have to do. She could still remember everything that had happened in that altered world, and it was haunting her. The life without him or Henry, without anything, serving as Jafar's hired killer. Not far from what had always been destined to become of the Black Swan, perhaps – but if so, why couldn't she shake its cold claws in her heart?

They reached the palace after a huffing climb, and it took some time for Elsa to convince the skeptical guards that she was indeed the genuine article and that yes, she wanted all these ragamuffins and shady-looking characters admitted with her (but to keep an _especially_ sharp eye on _that_ one). Once she did, however, they were floored, hastening to welcome their queen back, to send servants to start fires and make supper, to prepare bedchambers for the guests and bring them in out of the cold. While still not entirely recovered from Jafar's assault on it, or Prince Hans' subsequent depredations, the palace, like its royal family, was stronger than it looked. Within an hour or so of their arrival, they were taking dinner in Elsa's private quarters, by the low light of several blown-glass aether lamps and multi-armed candelabras. Anna, having recovered her beloved, was sitting practically in his lap, arms around his neck, while Kristoff shot searing looks at Jafar; like the rest of them, he trusted the sorcerer even less than Sven at a fancy dinner party (the reindeer had not been invited to this one). The rest of the time, he was eyeing up Will with equal mistrust as Will eyed him right back, clearly inviting him to go a few rounds over the fine porcelain plates and sterling silverware; Emma made a mental note to check Will's pockets later. After all, he _was_ still a thief, and this might prove to be an unmissable business opportunity.

Conversation, for obvious reasons, was sparse and strained. At last, however, Jafar set down his goblet, cleared his throat as if calling the table to order, and said, "Very well. With Your Majesty's permission, may I exposit our present items of interest to the gathering?"

Elsa, lips tight, nodded briefly. "Fine."

"Capital." Jafar beamed around at his stone-faced compatriots. "My, such a glum to-do, isn't it? You would suspect someone had recently died and we were at the wake." He glanced blandly at Regina. "Someone still might, you know."

She tensed. "If you're _threatening_ me, you twopenny excuse for a tin-pot dictator – "

"No," Henry broke in hastily. "She's – she's still my mum. Nobody's killing her."

"Nobody's killing anyone," Emma said curtly, glaring at Jafar. "And you're not doing yourself any favors by trying to turn us against each other. Tell us what Gold is planning, how we can stop it, and keep it short."

"Whyever would I conspire to turn you against each other?" Jafar looked wounded. "Indeed, a gang of lovable misfits finding a family together – who am I to get in the way of such a touching tableau? If you are prepared to overlook each other's manifest character flaws and the fact that three or four of you have been engaged in actively attempting to murder each other at diverse intervals – including the two of you holding hands over there," he added, flicking his eyes at Emma and Killian, who let go as if they'd been spotted flashing Queen Victoria's carriage (likely not the worst thing the Queen had seen, especially considering the thwarted assassination attempt in the alternate reality). "As a matter of curiosity, where is the American inventor last spotted beneath the hindquarters of Prince Kristoff's most excellent reindeer?"

"What – _Walsh?"_ Emma was about to ask how on earth Jafar knew about him, before remembering that they'd still had Killian's old medallion, the one Jafar had enchanted with a surveillance spell, in their possession during the flight to Norway; indeed, Walsh was the one who had discovered it in the first place. "What do you need with him?"

"His low cunning and lack of scruple, as well as frank willingness to make a quick fortune, are just the sorts of attributes I value in my assistants." Jafar rubbed his fingers together. "And his actual devices may help us in misleading Robert Gold long enough for my plan to work. So?"

Kristoff, who had been too involved in wordlessly jousting with Will to realize that the sorcerer was speaking to him, jumped as Anna kicked him under the table. "What? Him? I told him he was free to go, but since his balloon was destroyed, he's probably still somewhere in the city selling troll dung to people and calling it miracle curative. Unless your great plan involves convincing Robert Gold that he has a terrible case of arsehole fever and only immediate dosage from this obviously completely trustworthy shyster will save him – which I doubt – then what exactly good is Walsh going to do us?"

Jafar sighed. "If everyone would let me explain instead of distracting me with meaningless pleonasm, I was about to get there. In sum, when we returned so dramatically from my alternate timeline thanks to Queen Elsa and the golem, I lost the third djinni bottle – the one that confers reality-altering principles upon its owner. I fell victim, I confess, to the sin of hubris, and imported Robert Gold into said reality to serve as my personal flunkey and boot-blacker, which was exceedingly satisfying in the brief amount of time I was permitted to exercise my prerogatives without interference. But it also means that when everything was undone, it may very well have allowed him to get his hands on the bottle. More than likely, in his mad thirst for revenge, he is well on his way to collecting the other two from my Paris residence. And if _that_ happens. . . does the import strike you sufficiently on your own, or do you require me to construct a diagram? I was, I daresay, quite merciful in my estimations of what a proper Britain should look like. Robert Gold will be constrained by no such human decency."

Silence around the supper table. Nobody could doubt Jafar's word, at least in this; if Gold got his hands on the same power that his bitterest rival had deployed successfully and very nearly permanently, he very well might lay waste to the entire world. Emma had heard him confessing his ambitions to her in that hansom cab in Monaco, after he had plucked her off the street and intended to use her as live bait to capture Killian. _We must act urgently and decisively in wiping Jafar and all his kind from the face of the earth. As well, there was a particular young woman in China that gave us trouble the last time – Mulan, I believe her name was. She fought like some sort of oriental Jeanne d'Arc, but while she has languished in prison for years, it might be advisable to hasten her to Jeanne's same end. And in the case that you find this distasteful, I assure you that I am not acting from any unfortunate prejudice, but rather simply in the best interests of science and civilization. The continued progress of the world must be the charge of enlightened men, rather than these irrational and hysteric folk._ When that sort of mindset was flavored by revenge and driving hatred, the loss of his son before his eyes (no, she still wasn't going to think about Neal) the destruction of his life's ambition, and the indignity of being forced to serve Jafar's every whim. . . the consequences were too awful to imagine.

"We get it," Kristoff said, speaking for them all. "I think that includes even the ones in the back."

"Oy," Will cut in loudly. "Don't go chuckin' stones at me when you live in a glass house, mate. I bloody well actually died trying to escape Gold's minions, I took the poison so Elsa could live, and I served me time as a ruddy clay statue wrapped up in loo-paper so everyone else could go be big damn heroes. While you were. . . what? Sittin' here with your thumb up your bum watching the troll dung market to see if it might be profitable to jump in? I might be stupid, but I'm no liar and I'm no coward. Blow it out your arse."

Kristoff opened his mouth furiously, as Anna and Elsa laid immediate hands on the arms of their respective menfolk and silently backed them down from what would have been a spectacular midair collision over the mince pie. Jafar, meanwhile, rolled his eyes at the heavens, tapping his long fingers together, until the incipient threat of masculine poisoning had passed. "As I was saying, the House of Bernadotte's dismal taste in intimate partners aside, this is where our friend Mr. Walsh comes in. His experience in producing convincing knockoffs and fake magical items will be crucial in preparing a pair of bottles that look exactly like the real thing, but indeed are not, in order to fool Gold into going for those ones instead. While we, of course, secure the genuine artifacts and ensure that they are in no position to hurt anyone else again."

Emma eyed him suspiciously. "If this is all just an elaborate decoy to get _your_ hands on them again, you can forget about it. We'll do this without your help. Why would anyone in their right mind trust that you'd just relinquish them and do the right thing? You wouldn't."

"Still such a cynical nature beneath that beautiful face, Miss Swan," Jafar lamented. "But I invite you to propose precisely _how_ you would make good on that threat. You all have, furthermore, left me powerless, so I have no ability to work any magic from afar that might dismay Gold from his objective for a time. Nor do you believe me when I say that if you _do_ help me safely retrieve the bottles, I will give you whatever your hearts desire. What do you want – or should I say who? I have some idea." He glanced at Killian. "You, Captain, want your brother, I imagine. Miss Swan wants her family, to which she should address herself to Lady Regina and her enchanted vault. I can assist with that if Lady Regina takes it into her mind to be troublesome. Brave Sir Robin doubtless wants safety for his band of provincials and a way to ensure the Night Market's protection against future interference from the Royal Society. And the fae world, Miss Swan's kingdom – we all want that rebuilt, restored to its former glory. Such a list of good deeds to accomplish, I might be passing gas to the tune of 'Amazing Grace' before much longer. Well?"

Emma hesitated. "No," she said. "We're not letting you touch them."

"Why bother to save my life at all if you're not going to make use of me?" Jafar's voice had gotten sleeker than ever. "None of you has the right to sit in judgment of me – the little snag that prevented you from murdering me in the first place – and yet you still want to keep me as a pet sorcerer on a leash? This is mockery and mummery, hypocrisy and spectacle, and I grow weary of it. Either work with me or have the guts to kill me. Go on. Now."

The tension was taut, exquisitely tuned, like a lute string too close to snapping. Then Elsa made a small move with her fingers, and the cufflink she had confiscated from him earlier appeared in her palm in a fall of snowflakes. "Is this what you want?"

"Among other things." Jafar leaned back in his chair. "Yes."

Elsa glanced sidelong at Emma, as if to be sure that they would be prepared to use magic against him together if he showed any symptoms of going on the offensive, and she nodded minutely. This still did nothing to soothe anybody's suspicions, and Killian shifted as if to have better access to his sword, but after a long moment, Elsa handed the cufflink over. "My sister saw the good in me when I couldn't see it myself," she said coolly. "I don't see any good in you now, but maybe I'm wrong. Surprise me."

Jafar daintily looped it back into his cuff and snapped it shut. "Your phrasing may be indelicate, but your point comes across quite well. Tell me, Your Majesty. What do _you_ want? Surely it cannot merely be the thief here, but if he inexplicably does have some part in it, that could be arranged. It would be unthinkable for you to pursue intrigues with the common scum of the London gutter, so. . . a dukedom? I hear Wesselton might be available. Money? A convenient forgetting potion for the rest of the kingdom? I _can_ help."

"I don't want your help. Or your trickery." Elsa's expression remained appropriately frosty. "I gave that back to you for one reason. Protect the bottles from Gold and track down Walsh, if that's what you need to do. Now."

Jafar blinked, then shrugged. Without a word, he conjured up a picture in the air: a magnificent Parisian _hôtel particulier,_ windows dark, standing in a semicircle with its neighbors on a broad, handsome plaza. "Captain, as you are the only one of the present company who visited me in France, can you please confirm that is my residence in Paris, on the Place Vendôme?"

Emma glanced sidelong at Killian, who nodded tersely. "Aye," he growled. "Get on with it."

Jafar, unperturbed by the gruff tenor of this response, continued to sketch a pattern with his hands, and a dim golden glow enshrouded the creamy stone, clearly functioning as some sort of protective nexus. "There," the sorcerer said. "I can't do any more at this distance, and we cannot portal there due to the ironic fact that I myself set up safeguards against any rival sorcerers attempting such skulduggerous methods of arrival. But that should keep Gold out long enough for us to enact a diversion – which requires our mutual friend, Patrick Walsh. Hence – "

He made a complicated little figure with his fingers, resulting in something which apparently only he could see, and nodded. Then he turned to the royal guards and said, "The man is in a tavern in the shipyards of Aker Brygge, which is called something like the Ugly Duckling, if I am translating _Stygg Andunge_ correctly. You'll know him by his bottle-green jacket and determination to sell something called Mrs. Poppins' All-Purpose Panacea & Personal Pepper-Upper, which promises such results as – " he squinted – "clearer eyesight, improved mental acumen, whiter teeth, fresher breath, more energy, and lest us not forget, stallion-like stamina. Oh, dear me. I do hope that was not indelicate."

"Doesn't sound bad," Will said. "How can I get me hands on some of that stuff?"

"I am sure, Mr. Scarlet, he shall bring far more of it than anyone actually requires or could expect to derive the remotest measurable benefit from – but if you want to part with your hard-stolen gold, far be it from me to dissuade you." Jafar shrugged, then gestured to the guards again. "Fetch him, if you'd be so kind."

When a look at Elsa produced confirmation, the guards bowed and saw themselves out. Left with an awkward silence, Jafar remarked, "You know, I fail to quite grasp why stallion-like stamina is something to covet. I am far from an expert on the topic of horse breeding, but it seems as if they get in and out with the business quite swiftly. The epitome of – what would you call it? A two-pump chump? Two-thrust bust? Two-stroke choke? But then, since the image in the public's mind is one of unrestrained virility, you can get away with such deplorably misleading advertising. What does the table think?"

Regina, looking scandalized, put her hands over a very interested Henry's ears.

"I beg your pardon. Merely attempting to make light conversation to pass the time. Perhaps Prince Kristoff, who among all of us is the most likely to be familiar with the subject, would care to weigh in?"

"Friendly tip," Kristoff said. "We're letting you stick around to keep Robert Gold's grubby paws off ultimate power. That's it. Leave the witty remarks to the rest of us."

"Witty? Is that what you call them?" Jafar beckoned to one of the servants to refill his wine glass and took a leisurely sip; he was clearly enjoying himself immensely. _Then again, he would._ "Don't worry. I won't tell anyone."

Kristoff made an indeterminate noise in his throat, Will looked briefly tempted to congratulate Jafar but restrained, and nobody else said anything until at length the hall doors opened and the guards marched in a ruffled-looking Walsh, complaining voluminously at being interrupted from what had apparently been a very profitable night of custom. On sight of the gathering waiting for him, however, his jaw dropped, he brushed hay off his jacket, and bowed deeply. "Your Majesty, Your Highnesses! And even Miss Swan? Shucks if it isn't my lucky day! What can I do for you? I've got just one bottle of Mrs. Poppins left, capital curative for any sort of dyspepsia, halitosis, hair loss, and foot fungus, and available at a bargain just for – "

"Please," Jafar said. "Do not waste our precious time with shilling for your useless products. Your summoning here has been on a far more important task. Can you make us two bottles that look – " he waved a hand, unrolling a scroll of parchment from thin air, and passed it to the self-styled wizard – "exactly like this? And I do mean exactly. Flaws cannot be tolerated."

Walsh studied it with a bemused expression. "What – you want me to put the substance in 'em?"

"I expect that is the least helpful circumstance you could possibly produce, short of making us actually drink it. Indeed, at this point it would be far more useful for you promptly ceasing to think you have anything of value to contribute to the conversation _or_ medical science in general. But I am, in fact, offering you a chance to help save the world." Jafar cut his eyes at Emma. "In addition, I have heard that ladies love heroes."

Killian cleared his throat like an entire cannon brigade.

Walsh, however oblivious he might otherwise be, was clearly astute enough to pick up on that, and wisely elected not to demur, even if he might still have been harboring visions of turning Killian in for a substantial reward. "Well," he said, straightening his bowtie. "Patrick Walsh can definitely do that for you. Yes sir."

"Kindly do not refer to yourself in the third person. It may begin to irritate me." Jafar smiled his most serpentine smile. "I shall equip you with a suitable workspace and anything else you may require, but I do expect that the project shall be completed by morning. We really do not have time to waste, as I said. Succeed, and the world's riches are yours. Fail, and. . . well. Given the foe we are up against, I suspect it shall shortly become irrelevant."

Walsh still looked dubious, but he was also evidently aware that this was a situation in which there was no possibility of refusal. "Well," he said again, after a longer pause. "I am glad to be of service for you folks. Money in everyone's pocket. Definitely can do."

"Excellent." Jafar gestured languidly. "Then, please, do get working. I must converse with the queen on the particulars of how she intends to bring down the ice wall without flooding the rest of us, or providing the steamers a convenient excuse to flee directly to Britain and sell their cargo at pennies to the barrel. The rest of you, however – you're dismissed. Good night."

* * *

Emma and Killian left the hall together, venturing out into the chilly dark corridors of the palace and climbing side by side up broad carpeted staircases and into the upper floors. They kept stealing glances at each other, then looking away quickly, and he finally took the bull by the horns. "So, love. Are we going to talk about this?"

"Talk about what?" Emma concentrated intensely on trying to discern which of the doors might lead into a bedroom. Not that that was particularly safer ground, but still.

He sighed. "Emma."

Since he so rarely called her by her given name, that was enough to swivel her head unwillingly toward him. She knew she was being unfair, closing off to him more than ever, but what had happened in Jafar's alternate realty had shaken her to the core. How was it possible that after all her pain and all her loss, all her promises to herself, all her efforts, all the thousand good reasons she should feel only mild disdain or simply nothing at all for the man she had been contracted to hunt down for money, the idea of living without him – now or ever again – broke her out in a cold sweat? How could that be the simple, unerring tactic Jafar had used to destroy her armor and bend her to his will with only the minimum amount of scurrilous manipulation? She had chosen it full well, once he had put her in a place to believe that Killian's death was true. It was like setting out to sea with a gaping hole in her boat, trying to fight a war without a shred of armor. Her heart hurt in her chest, her breathing too. Everything. Everyone. All of it.

"Killian." Her likewise uncharacteristic use of his name pulled his eyes to her, strongly as if to magnetic true north, unwavering. "I – I need time, all right? I need time."

"You had time." His lips were grim. "Decades of it. A new century. I know it wasn't real, but what you were feeling – what I said to you, the reason I knew my hallucination was just that, was because you couldn't return my – my view of the matter. Before we go any farther, before we lead each other any further astray, all I ask is that you're honest with me, just for a moment. Do you want me to forget about this, about. . . the idea of anything with the two of us? Is that what your time there showed you? Because if so, bloody hell, just say so. Better for both of us that way."

"I. . ." Emma clenched her fists, trying to stop them shaking. She looked away – then, furious with herself, made herself lift her gaze to his. "No. No, I don't want you to stop trying."

He closed his eyes briefly, looking both vindicated and exhausted. "So is it just the trying you want? I will always fight for you, with you, however you want me to, so long as it is remotely possible for me to do so. But is that what you want? To keep it in limbo? Wanting me to try means you, at least theoretically, also want me to succeed. But what does that look like? Tell me, Emma. I've no clue, and I don't want to presume."

Her hands ached with the urge to touch him, as she had desired to throw himself into his arms when they woke up in the rubble and the rain in London and he was alive, he was _alive,_ he was breathing on his own, he was solid, he took up spaces, he had consequences. Nothing had ever rocked her as much as that, made her feel like the world was still possible. As if there had been one single, solitary scrap of grace, and she had to clutch onto it, but never ask for more. Never dream that more would be given to her, because it wasn't, it never was. But with him standing here, just the two of them, and the wild winter moon paving tracks on the floor, she was almost brave enough.

"I. . ." She sucked in a ragged breath. He had been vulnerable, exposing himself like this, giving her the power to strike him down. If nothing else, she owed him the same. "Hook. . . Killian. . . when I thought you were dead. . . when I thought that was the way I had lived for years and years. . . you and Henry both, nothing else mattered. Jafar could have suggested anything, and I would have done it, enchanted alternate reality or not. And I. . . I couldn't. I couldn't stand it."

She could barely look at him, but once more, she did, and found nothing but the purest, most unspeakable tenderness in his eyes. No judgment or censure whatsoever, no anger at her for not being different, for not risking more when everything she already had had torn such a ragged, weeping hole in her heart. "Love," he said, very gently. "I'm here now. I'm real. And whatever's coming, we'll find a way to defeat it, together. I can't promise you what will happen, because I don't know . . . but will you let me comfort you tonight?"

Emma wavered one last time. Then finally, she jerked her head in a tiny nod. "All right," she whispered. "Tonight."

* * *

They found a bedroom slightly further down the hall, and stepped inside it, barred the door. The bed was a luxuriant four-poster, piled with featherbeds and quilts and pillows, and when they were first alone, they went nowhere near it. Merely stood in the pool of moonlight in the middle of the carpet, him cupping her face and just looking at her, as she held onto his hook and hand alike. Foreheads touching, innocent and chaste, there together against the gathering storm. Just the two of them, and nothing, nobody else.

When they finally began to kiss, it was not so innocent. They had waited too long, held themselves back past every conceivable limit, and their mouths were wet and raw and hungry, open and searching, as he pulled her lip gently between his teeth and she gasped, head arching into his hand firmly braced on the back of her neck. They pulled each other closer, fingers and hands and arms and shoulders, wrapping themselves into one being with two halves, cracks finding the place where they fit. No more missing pieces. No more fear.

Emma noticed in a dim way that she could breathe again, that it no longer hurt, as Killian started carefully unlacing her corset, managing the several complicated layers of her underthings with surprising dexterity, helping her step out of the ruffles of her petticoat, until she was in just her shift, skin pale as porcelain in the moonglow. He looked at her for a long moment, looked and looked, and she saw his throat quiver as he swallowed. "Christ," he whispered. "You are so beautiful."

She smiled tremulously, then began to undo her braids, letting her thick white-gold hair spill loose around her shoulders in a delirious swirl, as he lifted a handful of it to his nose and breathed deep. She began to return the favor with his clothes, of which there were quite a few less than hers and not nearly as byzantine, which she chalked up as rather unfair, considering. But then he was stepping free of the tight leather trousers, lean and sun-browned and strong, and she needed him more than she could ever imagine needing anyone, clawing back into his arms as if she had been underwater too long, kissing him every way she could, fingers in his tousled dark cowlicks, as at last he lifted the shift over her head, and they were in nothing but their skins.

He stood for a moment, still worshiping, then picked her up effortlessly, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He carried her to the bed and they tumbled together among the quilts, as she cupped his head in both hands and kissed him until they were drunk, as he shifted his weight atop her and nudged her legs apart with his knee. She could feel the hardness of him, knew he was more than ready, and there was a corresponding wet sweetness blooming low in her, until he shifted his hand to cup it, and she gasped. "Killian," she hissed. "God. Yes."

The pirate captain braced himself awkwardly and muttered a curse about his hook, until she reached up with her free hand and fumbled the buckles loose, easing the complicated leather apparatus off the stump of his left arm. She heard it hit the floor with a thump, and he shifted again, pressing at her, eyes meeting hers in a question. The last chance to turn back.

By way of answer, Emma wrapped both arms around his torso and pulled him down into her, feeling her sensitive folds part all at once as he came into her, cool and heavy and hard whereas she felt as if she had become nothing but heat. She moaned, rolling her hips to align them better, hooking her ankles around the back of his straining legs, delighting in his strength and his self-control at once, the coiled tension she could feel waiting to burst free. Her breath came in strangled little gulps as he buried his head between her breasts, lavishing her with kisses, branding each one into her flesh like a fallen star. "Oh God," she whined. "Now. Please now."

Killian Jones took her at her word. She sucked another gasp as he started to move, in slow, considering strokes at first, testing out the fit, the connection, soft rasps against her, then finding a sweet spot and deepening his thrusts until she was keening. Her muscles bunched and tightened in rhythm to his movements, skin sliding against the sheets, as he slid a hand down to the small of her back and lifted her into a better position, knees spreading on either side of her and uttering a deep masculine sound in the back of his throat that made her want to devour him. In fact in a moment more, she worked up enough momentum to flip them over, straddling him and guiding his good hand to her cleft, fingering at her nub, as she rode him mercilessly. But then he flipped them again, throwing her flat beneath him, and she could feel him practically to the back of her throat. She purred in his ear, using her hands to guide him deeper, could hear the carnal wet sounds of their enjoined bodies, bracing her heels and arching her back. "Yes," she gasped, incapable of forming anything else remotely coherent. "Yes. Yes. _Yes."_

The captain was, to say the least, devoted to his work. Emma was seeing stars, scarcely cared if the door burst open right now and the rest of the palace stood to watch (well, perhaps she _might_ care, but it was hard to be certain). With as long as they had held back, neither of them could last much longer, and she felt her orgasm coming in deep, slow pulses, first a ripple and then a breaking wave, washing over her and pulling her out into a vast white-hot sea. She sighed, then whimpered, then cried out, even as Killian was muffling the sound of her release with his mouth, biting and suckling and exploring at her lips, then joining her in it, as every knotted muscle in her body let go and she felt as if all her bones had vanished at once, until for a mad, marvelous moment she existed entirely without pain or fear. Her head spilled back on the pillow, and they collapsed, entangled. Her chest heaved, sucking air to no result.

Killian made some other completely wordless sound of need and desperation, and his head fell on her breast, heavy as a spent cannonball, as she stroked his sweaty dark hair and he mumbled things she rather thought it was better not to understand. "Mary, Mother of God," she made out at last. "Bloody hell. Bloody hell, Swan. Oh Christ, love. Christ."

"Shh." Emma cradled him, feeling too full, too fragile for words, not wanting the spell to end. This might still be the last night, the last time. The world could return to what she had always known it was, and take him away from her. When they woke in the morning, when they went to end this, everything could still come crashing down. Still could.

Yet for now, for this, she could not bring herself to regret it. Not in the least. Not a bit. Felt like the swan princess Gold had called her once, mockingly, wondering if the Black Swan would rise. If Killian would come to find her. And now – far beyond anything Gold had expected, that Emma had dreamed of, that she would ever have known or believed – he had.

They lay together for a long moment, Killian still inside her, until he rolled off and settled down beside her, warm and solid and heavy, and she turned into his arms. She buried her head in his chest, noting abstractedly how good it felt to be held, to jump, to be caught. _Oh God, oh God, I'm begging you please, don't take this sinner from me._

Their breathing slowed. The night went on, soft as a thief. The stars shone cold as crystal.

They slept.


	28. Chapter 28

Emma awoke with winter morning light on her face, shining through her closed eyelids in a warm cherry glow. She was deliriously comfortable, liquid and boneless, sprawled out in a pile of impossibly soft pillows and quilts, and for a long moment, she was completely befuddled as to how such an agreeable circumstance could have possibly obtained, given her recent jumble of memories, of running and fighting and falling and collapsing stone and howling voids, the great clay countenance of the golem and the countervailing, colliding currents of magic in the ballroom of Buckingham Palace. Then the return journey and the Night Market and the portal and the arrival in Norway, the supper with Jafar and the threat of Gold taking over the world and Walsh with his quack tonic and a dark corridor and –

Oh God. Her eyes shot open, half in disbelief and half in desperate hope, as she reached out to grope at the place in the bed beside her and find nothing but a lingering warmth in the sheets. As sense returned, she saw Killian Jones sitting by the window in a dressing gown he had apparently swiped from the half-open wardrobe, carelessly belted at his waist to reveal most of his chest. The way he looked in the sunlight almost stopped her heart, especially when he lifted his head, saw she was awake, and broke out into a dazzling smile. "Good morning, Swan."

"Good morning," Emma squeaked, mortified at herself for sounding like a blushing virgin. She had briefly feared it had just been a dream, and as always, she would be alone when she woke. But he got up so quickly and trotted back to the bed, shucking the dressing gown and crawling in next to her, that the thought popped like a fragile soap bubble. She reached for him as he rolled toward her, wrapping her in his arms, and they kissed for a long moment, deep and slow, then again, giggling, as she threaded her fingers into his magnificently disheveled hair. She wanted to lie like that forever, his weight and warmth atop her, their legs twisted in the covers, and plainly he had no objections to doing likewise. But he had just shifted his weight, good hand moving to stroke her, when there was a loud knock on the door and without ado, it burst open.

Killian shouted, trying to roll himself up in the sheet, but evidently not fast enough. "Oh God, I'm blind!" Eyes ostentatiously screwed up, Will Scarlet staggered backwards. "Blind!"

"Shut up before I turn you into a statue again," Killian snarled, now decently covered. "At least then you couldn't talk. _Or_ appear exactly when nobody wanted to see you, for that matter."

Will, eyes still shut, lurched forward, hands groping to be sure he did not walk directly into the bed and thus achieve a far closer acquaintance with both of them than anybody present cared for. "It may interest you to hear that while _some_ of us are havin' ourselves the jiggery-pokery, the wizard's finished his fake bottles and we need to get movin' on our plan. The important, world-saving one. The one which we ought to get goin' on if we prefer that Robert Gold _not_ have the ability to turn us into bleedin' geraniums or whatever he'd sic on us, I dunno. Which means that the ones of us sailin' the seven seas of love should probably – "

"Yes, Scarlet, we get it. Now piss off."

Will, with an overly elaborate bow, turned around, stubbed his toe, and warbled out, leaving Killian looking both deeply irritated and cheek-bitingly amused. "Couldn't we have just kept him as a lump of clay until all this was over?" he groused. "Should have known he'd take the first buggering opportunity to – "

He was cut off as Emma slipped her hand into the ruff of dark hair at the back of his neck, pulled him down for one more long and extremely thorough kiss, then pulled back with a muffled groan of regret on both their parts. "Come on, Captain," she said. "He's right. We have to get moving."

They rolled out of bed, located their scattered clothing, and stole one last quick kiss. Then they straightened themselves, squared their shoulders, and descended the grand staircase to the private antechamber where they had met last night, prepared for anything.

Jafar, Walsh, Elsa, Will, Anna, and Kristoff were all present, along with Henry; Robin and Regina were, rather surprisingly, still absent. As Emma and Killian slid into their seats, Walsh glanced up with a toothsome smile, holding up one of his completed forgeries for Emma's inspection. "Well, what do you think? Cracking, isn't it? You know, my offer still stands. Once this is all done, we can take our reward and go settle down somewhere. Be good together, you and me. Get all kinds of – "

There was a loud thump, and everyone jumped and glanced around to see that Killian had dropped a knife blade-first into the table, just a few inches from Walsh's hand. "Oops," he said. "Terribly clumsy of me."

Emma shot him a warning look, discreetly making her fingers glow gold to smooth away the resulting gouge in Elsa's fine mahogany tabletop. She accepted the platter of breakfast as it was passed around, unable to stifle a yawn, which Walsh observed with keen-eyed attention. "Suffering from insomnia, my dear? Night terrors? Restless sleep? Bed-wetting? I have a tonic for that, you know. One sip and you'll drop off like a baby, and my special ingredient allows you to control your dreams! Wonderful stuff, just a – "

"I slept fine, thank you," Emma said, stepping on Killian's foot under the table. "And you can quit trying to get me to buy anything you're selling."

Jafar cleared his throat, turning to Walsh. "Indeed, my dear fellow," he said mildly. "Small piece of gentlemanly advice. Amorous dalliances are, alas, a subject rather less familiar to me than one might hope, though that is the price of dedicating oneself to one's work. But even the blinded Cyclops of Homer could observe without difficulty that you are, shall we say, barking up an extremely futile tree. If you continue as you have begun, you may find a hook lodged between the eyeballs of your rather simian physiognomy, and no one here shall lift a finger to stop it."

"Yeah," Will said. "Whatever he said. I didn't find the captain starkers on top of her because he was just tryin' to take a bath, wandered into her room, then accidentally tripped and fell on her."

Killian looked as if he was about to get out of his chair and murder his underling properly this time, Will gave him a wounded expression as if to protest that he was doing him a favor, Kristoff let out a suspiciously whoop-sounding noise that made Anna whack him, Elsa choked, Henry was puzzled, and Jafar permitted himself a small, superior smile. But before Emma could do much more than sputter about the fact that their intimate habits were now common knowledge thanks to Will bloody Scarlet's big mouth, she was mercifully rescued by the belated appearance of Robin and Regina. They too were dressed and decent and maintaining a decorous few paces from one another, but Emma could read the tale told by their flushed cheeks and guiltily stolen sidelong glances clear as day, given that she and Killian were doing the exact same thing. This, however, considerably surprised her, as she had not predicted that the evident attraction between the honorable outlaw and the unscrupulous sorceress would progress any further than bickering, but apparently last night had served as a consummation on more than one front. Then again, if you found yourself out of danger at last, just for one night, with a comfortable bed and privacy assured and feelings brewing unsaid, bottled up to the point of bursting, it was a combustible mix.

Jafar plainly noticed as well, and arched an eyebrow as the latecomers took their seats. "How kind of you to forsake the bountiful pleasures of the boudoir and join us at last, as one would apparently think that the fate of the entire world could be postponed until one had dealt with all those bothersome lacy underthings. They _are_ dealt with, I trust?"

Regina glared bloody murder at him. "Get on with it."

"Sublime." Jafar smiled modestly, then lifted the two bottles for the inspection of the gathering. "The estimable Mr. Walsh, despite his scandalous lack of perspicacity in matters of the heart, has done quite well for us in fashioning these. The next step is to imbue them with enough magic to mislead Robert Gold. I alas, cannot do it, as he is well acquainted with my signature and would recognize the deception instantly. Likewise with yours, Lady Regina, and you, Your Majesty, need to focus on getting that ice wall down. Which leaves. . . ah. Miss Swan, if you would?"

Emma, quite sure she remembered a plan at one point for Jafar to siphon off a savant's magic and attach it to himself, not to mention what he had in mind for the savant, tensed. "What exactly am I supposed to do?"

"It is simplicity itself," Jafar reassured her. "The original artifacts in the City of Brass were formed in an era before gentlemen's magic, structured and categorized and carefully rationed. They are suffused with pure raw power, hence exactly similar to what you, as an untrained but extremely naturally able wielder, will produce. Just, ah. . . let loose, as it were."

Emma remained hesitant. "If they have real, strong magic in them, won't that be just as bad if Gold gets his hands on them?"

"No, not in the least. All they could do is give a jolt to his current repertoire of spells, but not enable him to perform any new ones. It won't make him any more dangerous than he already is." Jafar sighed. "There really is so much I could teach you, you know. It would be a crying shame to see that potential wasted on small-time bounty-hunting jobs, if you're even liable to have any more. When this is over, at least promise me you'll consider it."

"Fine. I'll consider it." Emma gave him a demure, dangerous, closed-mouth smile, then – still not without misgivings – shook her sleeves up, as the rest of the group backed away to give her a clear shot. "So just. . . blast them?"

"In a manner of speaking." Jafar stroked his neat black goatee. "Yes."

"All right then," Emma muttered, stretching her hands over her head, cracking her knuckles, then aiming at the bottles. It took a difficult few moments of effort, but when she found the reservoir within her, it was as easy as turning on a tap. A strong golden stream, far more beautiful and powerful than the weak winter sunlight, flowed out and flooded over the bottles, and she thought how the aether scientists had worked out that the magical dust fell in the thickest and best qualities in the extreme northern latitudes – potentially the extreme southern ones a well, but nobody had made it far enough across the vast desolation of Antarctica to be sure. Something to do with the mechanics of the world's magnetic poles and the way the veils were simply thinner here; Emma didn't remember all of it. But the point was that here in Norway, her magic was stronger and steadier than it had ever been in the jumbled, dangerous month or so since she had both discovered she had it and started using it. It briefly occurred to her to wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that _she_ was stronger and steadier than she had ever been, having Killian at her side (and other places) instead of trying to push him away, but she dismissed it.

The golden deluge lapped over the bottles, making them rock and sparkle and pulse, until at last Jafar made a gesture to signify that that was sufficient and Emma dropped her hands, breathing hard; she felt exerted, drained, not entirely steady, and welcomed Killian's discreetly offered arm until she regained her equilibrium. "Now what?"

"My plan is tripartite. First, we need someone to get the bottles to Paris, deter Robert Gold if he is present, plant the fakes in my residence, and remove the real ones – Captain, you seem like the man for the job. Next, we need the Night Market, or whatever remains of it, roused and ready to fight, for I can guarantee that something terrible is about to befall London. The sort of crisis that only, of course, Gold can swoop in and solve, a way of re-establishing his good name and the inability of the Royal Society and the Government to manage without him. Sir Robin, that would be your arena. Take Scarlet with you, you may need live bait. And lastly, Lady Regina, doubtless as satisfying as it's been to keep innocent folk locked up and asleep in your enchanted vault all these years, it's come time to end it. You must break the curse and let them out."

Regina's eyes narrowed. "Why?"

"Why, doing the right thing would never occur to you?" Jafar's faux surprise was dripping with just enough sincerity to force her to once more bite her tongue. "Because in the event that all goes catastrophically awry and Gold _does_ get his hands on those bottles, the magic of the fae world is our only hope. At its full strength, it is capable of keeping him out, overpowering whatever he can throw at it. But unfortunately, that can never be so while you keep its royal family – Princess Snow and her husband, along with so many others – under your thrall."

"Snow wronged me," Regina said loudly. "She destroyed my life, she betrayed my secret – she's not the rightful ruler, she's just a girl who can't be – "

Emma, listening, felt a bolt of lightning go down her back as she suddenly understood. Had heard it spoken for the first time in her life. "My – my mother's name is Snow?"

"Yes," Jafar supplied. "Your father's is David, though most folk called him Charming. They're both asleep in that vault. As you can see, Lady Regina holds a tiresome and infantile grudge against your mother – long story, entirely unworthy of repeating – and that was what kindled animosities. Don't worry, my dear. She'll agree to get them out, or I'll kill her." He smiled brightly at Regina. "The curse _would_ come undone with your death, after all. Are you still determined to hold me in check, Miss Swan?"

Emma couldn't answer. The floor felt as if it was turning under her feet. _Snow. David. Mother. Father. I have parents. They're alive. They didn't want to leave me. They're alive._ It was too much to comprehend. Yet at the same time, she didn't want to take the simple route of killing Regina. She didn't even know why. She _had_ killed before, when there was no other option – one piece of work named Cruella, for example – but it was never how she preferred to go about her business, and besides, her marks were worth more alive than dead. It wasn't that she liked Regina in the least, now that she knew the truth. But she had flirted with the darkness too many times for her liking, the true Black Swan remaining a tangible and terrible threat in the back of her head, and that was why she had to keep fighting it. The only other choice was to let go, to fall, to drown, and she couldn't.

"Swan?" That was Killian, close at her side, hand under her elbow. "Swan? You all right, love?"

"Yes. Yes, I'm fine." She gave him a strained smile, then stepped away. Addressing Regina, she said coolly, "So? Are you going to break it?"

"I can't. It's not in my power, I don't know how." Regina set her jaw. "It was designed to be unbreakable – that's what Gold said, and if he had an interest in keeping the fae world and its magic completely subjugated, I imagine he was telling the truth. And even if I could, I wouldn't. You have no idea what you're dealing with, the kind of people your parents were. Look at you. You're a grown woman, a bounty hunter. With all their hypocritical ideals of honor and heroism, they'd disown you anyway. You don't need them, you don't need – "

She was cut off as Emma raised a fist, and all the lights in the room sputtered and went out at once, with a sound like distant thunder. "Listen to me, Lady Regina. You've raised my son for many years – well paid for it from my work that you're insulting, by the way – and he thinks of you as his mother likely more than he thinks of me. Nor do I particularly want to kill you, for his sake. But you have no right to tell me that I shouldn't want to know my parents, or to make the _barest_ assumption about what they'd think of me after you have held them prisoner for decades, are the reason I grew up without them in the way I did. And if you do any further harm or try anything behind someone's back, or if we can't get the curse undone, or if Henry is hurt or dies because of any of this, I _will_ kill you. You can count on that."

Regina's dark red lips split in a mocking smile. "I'm sure it will be an adorable attempt, Miss Swan. I'll give you some pointers for the next time once you're finished."

Emma didn't flinch, the air crackling with tension and magic alike. She noticed Killian positioning himself behind her, ready to jump in in the event of a fight, and Jafar looking approving. "Very _good,_ Miss Swan. You are so delightful when you are assertive. Always make sure that those around you, especially your enemies, know your power and their place. And this one is your enemy, make no mistake."

"I know." Emma didn't take her eyes off Regina, even as the lights lurched back to life. "But there are bigger things to worry about right now than just the two of us. You, you're no friend to Gold either. If you're going with Robin back to the Night Market and getting ready for whatever he's going to unleash on London, I'm sure they could use you. You're a powerful sorceress. Try doing something decent with it for once."

"Decent?" Regina's mouth contorted bitterly around the word. "If that's the metric we're applying, exactly what have you done in the recent past that's so _decent_ you feel justified in holding it up as moral instruction for the rest of us?"

Emma hesitated. "Nothing," she said after a moment. "You're right. I'm a bounty hunter. I turn people in for money, whether or not they're guilty. The difference between you and me is that I know exactly how bad I am, whereas you still think you're an innocent, unfairly wronged angel. I don't know the whole story, but from what I've heard to date, I doubt it. I'm going to try to start something new as well. I'm sure we can compare notes."

With that she turned, having left Regina briefly and gratifyingly speechless, and addressed Jafar. "I'm taking the fake bottles to Paris," she said. "I'll plant them in your house and remove the real ones. Hook's coming with me. Robin, Regina, and Will are going back to the Market. If you have any spells that could track Gold or protect London, now's the time to suggest them. Otherwise, you'll stay here in Norway, where Elsa and the others can keep an eye on you as she works to get that ice wall down. Understood?"

Jafar blinked. "I would advise that I accompany you and the captain. It is my own house, after all. And with the difficulties you might encounter – "

"No. You were the one who said Gold would recognize it if it was even your magic. And forgive me if I'm not falling over myself to let you anywhere near those bottles, after what you did with them last time. Did I stammer? You're staying here."

Jafar blinked once more, then smiled again, with teeth. "Indeed. Assertive."

"Make sure those around you, especially your enemies, know your power and their place." Emma's answering smile was all sweetness. "Now, with that settled, as you keep reminding us, we're very short on time. We have to get going."

* * *

It was a dilemma of considerable difficulty as to how Emma and Killian were going to get to Paris in a fashion both efficient and discreet. Jafar could just portal Robin, Regina, and Will back to London, but as his own safeguards prevented him doing likewise in Paris and as the Irish Travellers, after one too many run-ins with the draconian French persecution of practical magic, had given up visiting their old markets there altogether, neither of the previous options were feasible. There was a passenger airship leaving from Stockholm, making call at several major European cities, and finally it was decided that if it was discreetly put to the pilot (along with some gold) that Her Majesty the Queen needed him to fly directly to Paris first, no questions asked, that would have to suit. It would still take close to twelve hours, which was a nerve-grinding delay considering what was at stake, but nobody had a better idea.

Thus Emma and Killian – posing as a well-to-do English couple, Mr. and Mrs. James Nolan of Mayfair, out on the sort of peregrination that well-to-do English couples customarily took – were suitably disguised and, after a quick farewell of the others, transported to Stockholm by Jafar. Emma, in bonnet, corset, crinoline, shawl, and parasol, held onto Killian's arm; he himself was done up toff in top hat, pinstriped waistcoat, jacket, cravat, and trousers sharply pleated enough to commit homicide, as they made incremental headway through the slow-moving queue to board. Instead of his hook, which would obviously be far too much of a giveaway, Killian had screwed a gloved wooden hand into his brace, and if anyone was so indecorous as to get suspicious and enquire, they would be informed that it was an old war injury, suffered for the glory of Rule Britannia. God Save the Queen.

At last they got aboard, and into the first-class cabin that Elsa had insisted on purchasing for them. Emma could see that Killian was uncomfortable and impatient at being stuck aboard an airship he wasn't in charge of, and she thought that he must desperately miss the _Jolly Roger_ – his home, his pride and joy, his last link with his past from the days it had been a Royal Navy vessel and he a young lieutenant, flying under his brother's command. She thought again of that – ghost? Memory? Shade? of Captain Liam Jones, met briefly in the enchanted vaults of St. Vitus Cathedral under Prague, how the defensive spell had taken them to one of Killian's happiest memories because there were none of hers. And now even that had been poisoned anew, with the stain of loss and darkness and grief.

After what seemed a minor eternity, they took off, rumbling into the clouds. This was a passenger liner built for comfort, not the small, fleet _Roger,_ and with the time it would take. . . they couldn't get there any faster, and this being first class, there was a comfortably appointed and luxuriously sized brass bedstead. Emma's eyes flicked to it, then to Killian, watching Stockholm vanish below them with an opaque, troubled expression. Perhaps once more. Why not. Little else to do, they had been interrupted by Will that morning, and the need had been kindled in her stomach like a slow-burning peat fire, one of those that could burn underground for years without being quenched. She very much doubted, after all, that he would refuse.

In a moment more, Emma came to a decision. Reached under her petticoat, unfastened her lace garter, and pulled off her heeled boot, then unrolled the stocking down the slender, well-turned line of her calf, feeling his eyes burning a hole into her. She repeated the process with the other foot, then hiked her skirt up around her bared legs, a froth of ruffles spilling down them like a fabric waterfall. Crooked one finger at him. "Come here."

He did not need telling twice. Was already pulling off his neckerchief and shucking his jacket as he crossed the cabin, knelt between her spread knees, and reached around to get the rest of the ornamental but obnoxious flounces out of the way. Then dipped his head, began to do something absolutely scandalous with his tongue, and as she gasped and slid her fingers into his hair, decided that the flight to Paris would pass most enjoyably indeed.

* * *

They were still barely dressed when the airship began to bump and dip into its descent, having dozed off in a satiated, orgasmic stupor atop the disheveled covers, and thus were taken rather off guard, springing up and commencing a panicked retrieval of their inventively discarded clothing. Killian was absolutely hopeless at lacing up Emma's corset with one hand, so she finally just gave up and magicked it into place (wondering sourly what it said about ladies' undergarments that this was the better option). She re-tied his cravat for him, finding it difficult to stop touching him and reminding herself that they had not come to Paris, romantic a destination as it might be, with what Will termed jiggery-pokery as their intended occupation. The pleasured distractions had to end now. It could be that they were already too late.

The passenger liner wheezed down and into the docks at Gare l'Ouest station, in Montparnasse, and Emma and Killian debarked. Despite the late hour the place was still relatively busy, pigeons perching on the high cast-iron arches and chilly night air whisking ticket stubs and twopenny novels, half-eaten hot pasties and crumpled newspapers, the usual detritus left behind by travelers. They beat off some enterprising urchins and got a cabriolet, Killian gave the driver Jafar's address in the Place Vendôme, and they wheeled off.

They sat in silence as they threaded through the narrow streets, the driver occasionally leaning off the running board to shout at obstructions, and the lantern guttering in the damp wind. They passed a few street food stalls; as in London, most ordinary laborers ate their two daily meals at these, paying a few sous for a bowl of stew and a chunk of bread in the evening, or for a cup of overboiled coffee and a hot bun in the morning. But as they reached the wealthier precincts, such ramshackle establishments vanished, to be replaced with the swinging shingles of more prosperous taverns and supper and society clubs. Then they turned up the Rue Saint-Honoré, and into the splendid, secluded marble majesty of the Place.

Killian paid the driver, and he and Emma stepped out, approaching the indicated residence with a more than healthy amount of caution. It had escaped neither of them that this could well be an elaborate trap by Jafar; he had promised to relax the magical defenses so that they would not be vaporized on the spot, but even if he was telling the truth, this was an extremely delicate balancing act. Take them down too soon, and the residence and all its priceless artifacts, magical and otherwise, stood undefended, whether from a vengeful Robert Gold or a common Parisian street thief. Too late, and. . .

Emma picked up a broken cobblestone and chucked it at the door. It was not immediately gulped up in a murderous magical nexus, and instead fell rather anticlimactically to the stoop. With this first indication being hopefully promising of continued survival, they stole up the steps and tried the lock. It was still intact, but that meant nothing. Killian disposed of it with a few moments' work, pushed it until the latch clicked, and they stepped inside, into the pitch-black foyer.

Holding hands tightly, they tried to cross the floor as quietly as possible, toward the staircase that climbed magnificently into the gloom. Jafar had told them that the bottles were kept in his workroom on the second floor, so they made in that direction, blinking hard as their eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. Climbed the stairs, feet muffled in the thick Turkish carpet, and were greeted with several doors at the top. Emma, following some magical sixth sense, picked the middle one. They opened it, and tiptoed through.

More doors lined the corridor beyond, made of slick black stone that glimmered eerily in the light of the small golden globe Emma had conjured to light the way. She had the uncomfortable feeling that they would go on forever, had always been and would always be, but then she shook it away and focused. There was a faint chiming sound, like far-off bells, that was just enough to distract her, play havoc with her concentration. It wanted her to come to it, begged her to follow it, but when she glanced at Killian, she could tell he didn't hear it. He looked grim and wary, but not unnerved. _Magic? Or something else?_

She picked the door behind which the chiming seemed to be loudest, found it unlocked, and pushed it open. She couldn't seem to see anything inside, but she knew this was it, and beckoned Killian with a jerk of her head, their fingers still tightly entwined. They stepped in, looking in every direction, but the room remained oddly featureless. Blank. Black. Silent. An abyss.

The door slammed with a loud noise, making both of them jump. And as the light of Emma's golden orb grew stronger, she could see some sort of dark liquid pearled in thick droplets on the floor – which she originally thought was ink, but then, as it caught a gruesome crimson gleam, knew she was mistaken. She could smell it, almost taste it, rank and coppery in the back of her throat. Blood magic was the ancient of the ancients, never touched by gentleman magicians, now that they had aether to do their bidding without the uncomfortable business of animal sacrifice or raising demons. Research into it had doomed many a promising Oxbridge magician in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the fascination with, and fear of, hedge sorcery and witchcraft was at its height. It was crude but powerful – and terrible.

 _We should never have come here._ Emma felt her gorge rising. She wanted to hiss at Killian to get out, but her voice seemed to have caught in her throat. She didn't know if this foul working was of Jafar's doing or Gold's – but then in the next moment, the ball of light in her hand caught a gleam of eyes, and a high, cackling voice spoke from the shadows. "Miss Swan. Captain. So lovely to see you again, dearies. And to bring me such a gift? Wonderful."

Both of them went stiff as Gold stepped into sight – but Gold as they had never seen him. Instead of the soft-spoken, sleekly urbane Scottish scholar, this – creature, not quite man – was scaled and glittering, prancing and posing, skin an ashy grey and eyes a weird lucent yellow, dressed in a tight-fitting costume of something that looked like lizard hide. In one black-nailed hand, he held the crucial third bottle, the one they had been trying to keep away from him at all costs. "This is mine, you know," Gold went on. "It was kept in my castle, where it should have been safe. Only, an impertinent young boy seems to have stolen it and then let it fall into the hands of even more disreputable persons. Spare the rod, spoil the child, Miss Swan. Then again, you haven't had much to do with young Henry's upbringing, have you? I'll have to direct my disciplinary advice to someone else." He giggled. "Once I kill you."

"Stand down, beast." Killian drew his sword, angling Emma protectively behind him; she thought this was a rather unwise arrangement, as she was the one with magic, and thus capable of actually fending off Gold if – when – he attacked. She tried to shuffle them around, but he remained entrenched. "Give over that bottle, and nobody needs to die. Not even you."

Gold giggled again, with apparently genuine amusement. "My, my. Look how tenderly solicitous you've become, dearie. Is it _twoo wuv?_ But don't worry, it won't last! I'll have you watch as I kill Miss Swan, you'll be back to your black-hearted murdering bastard ways in a trice, and then, well, your own death will take a _very_ long time. You might even have gotten over her by the time it comes, the way you got over Milah. Didn't you?"

"Bloody hell, Gold, don't do this! I'll die fighting before I let you destroy her, this, everything! I don't know what you've done, but – "

The former President of the Royal Society ignored him. To Emma he said, "Dearie, do you remember that black knife, the _arthame_ of the _Key of Solomon,_ that that horrible savage used to control both of us? Something as old and dark as that, with so much power stored in it, used as a vessel for black magic throughout the centuries. . . what if a _person_ was to be that vessel instead? An ultimate Dark One, as it were. How does that line in the Hindoo _Bhagavad Gita_ go? 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Stirring. Poetic." He snapped his fingers. "I _like_ it!"

Emma didn't move. Of course she remembered that knife. Could never forget, both what it had done to her and the sheer magnitude of its destructive power, the way Jafar had cut holes in the very fabric of existence with it. "Do you mean. . . you took all the magic in that knife and transferred it into. . . into _you?"_ Remembered what Jafar had said, about how Gold getting his hands on the magical fake bottles couldn't give him any ability that he didn't already have, but this was one twist none of them had foreseen. No wonder Gold seemed far less than human, transformed into a true monster. The sheer weight of that black magic, the strength of it. . . as he said, the _arthame_ had been used in strange and profane rituals for centuries, was one of the most powerful and uncontrollable artifacts to ever exist, and now he literally embodied it. The Darkness. The Omega. The fallen angel, the seventh seal. And he had the means to control all of reality, reshape space and time, to twist all of existence to his whims. Unless – unless –

Even as Emma was teetering on the verge of all-out panic, she tried to cling to a shred of rational thought. If he _did_ have all three bottles, surely he would have used them by now, even as tempting as the prospect of gloating surely was. They might be here, but he couldn't penetrate whatever safeguards Jafar had erected around them, and hence either thought the fakes she and Killian had were the genuine articles, or intended to use her magic to break through. But how could she be expected to do it if the nearly all-powerful Dark One couldn't, if he –

And then all at once, she understood. Understood everything.

Jafar hadn't had the other two bottles physically on him when he got the third, but he had still been able to create his alternate reality. He had openly admitted that the fae world was the only way to defeat Gold, the only source of power strong enough to match him – hence why he had been so interested in offering to help Emma rebuild it, trying to threaten Regina into breaking the curse to restore it to full potency. So if he had taken the magic of the two bottles and woven it into the very fabric of the fae world, it would be available to him whenever he was in said world. Quite simply, all he needed to do was get hold of the third, and he would be able to use their magic-altering principles to his heart's delight. Which meant. . .

 _Jafar knew there were never two bottles in his house. That was all a setup, a distraction. This place. . . this room. . ._ The strange blackness, that sensation of emptiness, when they had stepped in here. It was a gateway, a bridge, just as the Night Market was. They were not in Paris right now; they were in the fae world, the shadow London, the very ones Gold had devastated with the terrible curse he had manipulated Regina into casting, knowing just as well that it was his last and most powerful enemy and had to be destroyed. He _could_ in fact use the magic of the bottles, but he didn't know that. If he tried, Emma would have to stop him, with the extra assistance of the two bottles of her own magic she had prepared on Jafar's behest. And in so doing, kickstart this place like lighting a tinder-dry forest on fire, and open the full floodgates of the fae magic to Jafar. He didn't need to get two bottles back or save them from robbery; he never had. He only needed to get back the one, the one in Gold's hand right now. And once Emma had dropped the pebble to start the avalanche, that would be simplicity itself.

She couldn't breathe. She didn't know if they could get back to Paris or anywhere else, or if Jafar was just waiting on the duel to the death between her and Gold to help himself to the unleashed magic, murder everyone in Norway – _Henry,_ she had left Henry there, had threatened to kill Regina if any harm came to him but might be the reason that it did – and get back to his inconsiderately interrupted scheme of world domination. From the ashes of his first attempt, Jafar had taken a lesson and carefully and patiently maneuvered himself into a position where he could not lose. Once Emma stopped Gold, as she had to do or risk utter annihilation, that would flood the fae power and the third bottle back to Jafar, who would then be able to do exactly as he had done before – and this time, leave no loose ends. While Gold raged like a loose cannon, there would be no one anywhere to have the barest idea of stopping Jafar. The only thing he could not have foreseen was Gold absorbing the dark magic of the _arthame,_ but even then, it would not matter. Not when he could erase Gold from history with the flick of a finger, or anything else he pleased. Publically destroy him if he wanted to be a hero, the way he had explained to Emma back in the alternate universe: that the people had to embrace him, see him as their savior, be coaxed into absolute subordination bit by bit, always thinking it was their choice. And who better to vanquish than the hated Robert Gold, symbol to London's underworld, and indeed most of Europe, exactly what was wrong with the power-crazed Royal Society and British imperial brutality? Especially when Gold had taken the incentive to make himself into a monster, and spared Jafar the trouble of dirtying his own hands with it?

There was only one way out of this, only one slim and ludicrous hope. If they were indeed in the fae world, time did not run the same way it did back in the real world, was a fluid ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, instead of a straight line. And the power of the bottles could affect exactly that.

They couldn't go forward from here. They had to go _back._

Emma glanced at Killian, hoping he would understand without her having to speak. He stepped up, and she hesitated only briefly, then handed him the satchel that contained the two false bottles. She didn't have time to question or analyze it right now, but she did better at magic with him around, with him literally holding the source of her power, and she needed everything she could get. Her plan sounded suicidal, even by their standards. Knock the bottle away from Gold, get hold of it herself, and pull them all out of the current timeline, out of space, out of the world itself, into – God knew where, really. But if the fae magic wasn't unleashed now when Jafar was waiting for it, but in the _past,_ and if Gold was trapped with them years or even centuries from his desired destination, he couldn't destroy London exactly when Jafar needed him to.

There was only the faintest chance that Emma and Killian themselves would ever get back, and she knew it was not likely at all. She could live out the rest of her life and die before she was even born, in some unknown past that would now be her future. He might be the only thing that came with her, the only thing to remind her that the other time had not just been some old, strange dream. _Going back to the start._ And past it. Square one.

Emma steeled herself, summoned up more magic than she ever had, burning through her until she felt faint and dizzied, scorched away in the glow and heat, only a vessel – but for the very opposite of what was inhabiting Gold now, the only magic powerful enough to do what had to be done. Until it was almost exploding out of her, but she had to hold it in check, couldn't tip him off, not yet, not until –

She let loose with both hands, throwing a tidal wave of magic at Gold right as he was turning toward her, catching him broadside and completely unprepared. Saw the bottle fly loose from his clutching fingers, up, up in the air like a bird, and threw herself forward, hands outstretched, to catch it. Saw it descending – then felt it settle into her grasp. Clutched it to her, closed her eyes, threw open the gates of time and space, and flung them out into the abyss.


	29. Chapter 29

What happened next was comparable to the moment Emma had dragged an unconscious Killian into the wardrobe in Monaco and they had been thrown out into the otherwhere, tossed and turned to tumble out in Applewood Hall – or at least, that was the closest thing she could possibly match it to. Whereas that had been a single fall of rain, this was a raging storm, ripping and tearing and twisting, reaping the fury of the whirlwind, pitching them into the maw of some great elemental nothingness. A leaf on the wind, spiraling and spiraling, buffeted to all sides with forces violent enough to rend one or both of them asunder, until she lost all sense of an individual body or independent thought and was just falling. Had always been falling, always would be. No end and no beginning. _Ouroboros._

That being so, she was considerably confused to open an eye and see nothing except mud. She could feel a distant vibration in the ground like the thunder of an oncoming train. Before she could collect herself significantly enough to fear that she was about to be painted all over the railroad tracks, arms caught her around the waist, lifted and swung her upright in a motion that did terrible things to her head; it felt like an egg someone had cracked open and whisked with a spoon. She groaned, fumbled out, and her groping fingers encountered first chill leather, then warm skin, and a low laugh rumbled in her ear. "Easy, love. You can rip the clothes off me when we work out what the devil just happened, eh?"

"K-Killian?" Emma's eyes flew open, and she discovered with unfathomable relief that indeed he had her tight, her head pressed against his chest and her feet lolling like a broken puppet's. She pushed herself upright, still unsteady, as she glanced around. It was daytime, perhaps mid-morning to judge from the light. It had been late at night when they entered Jafar's house back in Paris, but after a journey bending space and time, that meant nothing. "Where – _when_ – are we?"

He shrugged. "You're the mastermind, love, I'm just along for the ride. Last time with Jafar using the bottle, we ended up in an imaginary future, but this – I think this is the real past. Is that what you were aiming for?"

"Yes." In a few terse words, Emma explained her realization that Jafar wanted her and Gold to finish each other off, that he had never needed the two bottles to be saved due to having already incorporated their magic into the fae world, and that all he really needed back was the third. "I also think he decided that the easiest way to get his hands on a savant's magic was to do the same thing to me. After I died, he would still have that supply of my own magic stored in those bottles, the ones he told me we needed for the fakes. Then he could repeat the process, and essentially be a savant himself, as long as he was in the fae world – and with the third bottle, he could make that extend everywhere. Ultimate power over everything. One better than his old plan, even. And he nearly got away with it, under the guise of helping us defeat Gold."

Killian scowled. "Treacherous bastard," he muttered. "I knew we couldn't trust him, but it still didn't seem to me that I had the right to kill him."

"Well, never mind that for now." Emma stepped up, shading her eyes, and peered at the horizon. "We need to start getting our bearings. Any idea?"

"I thought. . ." Killian glanced at the tall, impressive hedge they had evidently just crashed out of. "I recognize that. It's the hedge at Hampton Court Palace, an entrance to the Traveller network. The one I used when I went to Edinburgh, in fact. They take advantage of thin places – ley lines, barrows, henges, the sort – to get about, so it seems quite likely that their gateways correspond with places of entry into the fae world. After all, they're often rumored to be mostly fae themselves. Left after one of the long-ago cataclysms, some unseelie king or queen or other winning a war and throwing them out, leaving them to wander in this world for centuries. Likely where I get it from. My penchant for crossing up authorities, at least."

Emma looked at him in surprise. "You're one of them? A Traveller?"

He shrugged. "My mother was. I never knew her, though. She. . . died giving me birth."

Emma felt a faint pang at the thought. Even as much as she was struggling with the idea of her mother being alive, real, existing, possibly loving her, wanting her – all of which sounded a thousand times more fantastical and impossible than any of the madcap adventures they had been thrown on to date – at least she was there. She might still have a chance. Killian did not, never had, and Emma was suddenly gripped with a deep curiosity about his past. "Does that mean you're from – my – world too?" She could not quite get her mouth around it. Even no matter what Jafar had said about her being born a princess of the fae, she couldn't connect it. She had always lived in the real world, in smoggy, smoky, dismal England. Alone.

"Ancestrally, I suppose." Killian's mouth tugged wryly. "In practice, I don't know much more about it than you. Come on."

He offered her his arm, and Emma took it. Further investigation of their surroundings proved that they were indeed in Hampton Court, in London, but the flag over the palace was not the Union Jack. It was the English Cross of St. George, red on white, and three golden lions on red, quartered with three golden fleur-de-lys on blue, which gave Emma a turn to see. She had briefly hoped they hadn't gone far – though indeed the more time the better when separating Gold, Jafar, and their intended disastrous outcomes of sundry villainous schemes, but the Union of the Crowns, formalizing what had been the case for over a century anyway, had officially been enacted in 1707, at which point the current flag was created. Its absence meant they were at least a hundred and fifty years in the past. If she recalled, Hampton Court had been built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the early sixteenth century – which meant they could be up to three hundred years away from home, and they would have to be very careful about getting back. Magic had been very dimly regarded in Henry VIII's day, ranking right up there with Papistry on the list of vile and undesirable influences corrupting the English people, and both his son Edward and his daughter Mary had continued this policy, executing as many sorcerers as they did Catholics (in Edward's case) and Protestants (in Mary's case). It was not until Elizabeth's time, when her spymaster Walsingham brought back the tales of aether from Italy and its properties began to known and studied and used in time for the first great victory of English magic to be the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, that attitudes began to change. This, of course, had further convinced the Catholic continent, the Inquisition, and the Pope of the red-haired Protestant whore's gross indecency and general heathen, sorcerous, and feminine iniquity, and the always contrary English wholeheartedly embraced magic as a result. If they had landed late in Elizabeth's reign, they would be relatively safe. Any earlier, and. . .

Emma pushed that thought away. They would have had a bad time of it no matter where they ended up, and she glanced over and saw the bottle lying in the dirt. She picked it up and stowed it in her skirt pocket. There seemed to be nothing to do but to confront this brave new world, and so they went.

They could smell the reek of the city long before they could actually see it. It was some distance from Richmond, on the outer boroughs of London, to the inner wards, and as they finally toiled atop the last hill, they beheld a vast confusion of wharves, warehouses, whorehouses, tenements, churches, leper hospitals, foundries, guildhalls, hemp and thatch and wood and stone, oil and pitch and turpentine and coal, buildings crammed cheek by jowl on the bridge and spilling over into the filthy, twisting, crowded streets beyond. There were none of the respectable brownstone-and-brick edifices that characterized the wealthier districts in their own day and age, no streetlamps or horse-drawn cabriolets or newsie-boys. This was London at least a century before the Great Fire, a profoundly medieval city of half-timbers, wattle-and-daub, narrow muddy lanes instead of broad cobbled thoroughfares. Everyone was shouting in an earthy, oddly accented vernacular that Emma realized after a few moments was fairly comprehensible English; she could read the shop names and such, but most public signage was of the pictorial variety. The printing press had been invented less than a hundred years ago from this point in time, and common literacy must be on the upswing, but still far from ubiquitous. If she could find a bookshop, something with a date on it – and it then occurred to her that while she, Killian, and Gold had all been thrown out of time together, only she and Killian had come back in. Had Gold landed just a few hedgerows away, or in a different year – or century – altogether? Set himself up as overlord, or something even worse?

They were already starting to attract dark looks for their strange clothing and appearance, and as they attempted to cross into the city proper, a self-important gatekeeper popped up and forwarded what was evidently an imperious demand for prompt payment. Without breaking stride, Killian reached into his jacket pocket and tossed him a sixpence, and while the man was squinting in befuddlement at the coin with its anomalous date and incorrect sovereign's head, Emma pulled them into the streets. "We need to be careful," she hissed. "If we change things, if we draw notice – "

"It was give him what he wanted or shoot him in the head, love. I suspected the former might be less conspicuous. And if one sixpence brings us down, our odds were abysmal to start with."

There was a certain morbid logic in that, Emma supposed, but it still made her uneasy. Where was Gold? Was he still that strange, reptilian creature of pure dark magic, running free and not at all constrained by rules or rivals? If Emma recalled, the Royal Society of English Magicians had been founded in 1716, in the aftermath of the first failed Jacobite rising, to ensure the country's stability under its new and unpopular German Hanoverian dynasty. (To be sure, they had not bothered asking George I for his sanction, and were not officially recognized until George II and the second Jacobite rising thirty years later, but most popular histories politely overlooked this.) Until then, magical influence in England had been divided among three competing institutions: the Star Chamber, the School of Night, and the Invisible College. It was the Star Chamber which came out on top, using magic as a political and diplomatic weapon, and been reorganized as the Royal Society – would Gold decide to address himself there? The School of Night had advocated for magic in art, alchemy, and literature, seeing it as a classical object of chaste admiration rather than of practical application, and the Invisible College occupied a middle ground. They considered it a natural philosophy and science to be studied and discussed by learned gentlemen, with the aim of using it to gainfully improve society, but they sharply disagreed with the Star Chamber's unscrupulous methods and insistence on developing magic as a weapon of war – they viewed it as an abstract and ultimate Platonic Good, being shamefully sullied by the ambitions and treachery of petty mortals. Some of their members had formed a competing Royal Society, attempting to keep the power-crazed magicians in check, but they had disappeared long since. Surely Gold would have no interest in allying himself there. Unless he had decided that the best place to hide was the last one anyone would think to look for him, a snake in the grass among his enemies. . .

Just then, Emma seriously entertained the demented but no longer at all improbable idea that the Invisible College's Royal Society had been dismantled precisely because Gold had arrived from the future and done the dirty work to ensure that it was. But if so, did that mean she should sit back and let him? Paradoxical as it sounded, if Gold had already meddled with the past, it was the world in which she had grown up. Stopping him now would qualify as changing history. Unless she did, and the Invisible College's Royal Society survived to challenge the other one. . . if Gold never existed or never had influence, never got Regina to cast his curse, then Emma might grow up with her parents, happy and wanted, spared from all the pain and deprivation that had been her upbringing instead. Regina had said she didn't know how to break the curse, but what if this was the answer? Ensuring that it never happened at all?

"Swan?" Killian touched her elbow. "Swan, love, where are you? Come back."

Emma blinked stupidly, feeling as if she had been unpleasantly woken from a lovely dream. She reached reflexively for the weight of the third bottle in her pocket. Once they got to the fae world, and hence had access to the magic of the first two, she would have the same reality-altering powers. Could shape time, not just travel through it. In Jafar's scheme of things, that had obviously not gone well, but as she had thought back in Monaco, not tempted by all the elaborate fantasy adventures, she just wanted magic to create a home for herself, a family. Who could it possibly harm? All of the Royal Society's victims would never have been hurt. . . the Night Market would spring back into existence, never destroyed by her selfishness and short-sightedness. . . the ability to wipe clean the slate of one's life, of all the lives, and start afresh. . .

"Emma," Killian said, slightly more sharply. "Wake up. I don't know where your head's gone, but I'm none so sure I like it. The plan. What's the plan?"

"The plan." The words felt hot and heavy as molten lead, when everything had been light and possible and perfect a moment before. "Killian, I just. . . I think Gold might be trying – well, technically he already did, years ago – he's the reason the Royal Society became what it did. That it had no rivals. Thanks to us."

"What? Emma, love, you're scaring me. What's this about?"

Emma struggled to explain her suspicion that Gold had in fact been responsible for the mysterious demise of the Invisible College in the past, which was actually happening now, and hence the centuries-long pre-eminence of the Royal Society. It occurred to her that if so, she was the one who had brought him here, placed him in a position to do so. Unless he had realized what she was doing at the last minute and steered himself to arrive at a moment of his choosing – that he had, so to speak, hitched a ride on her magical coattails to wherever he wanted – but there still remained the question of whether they should let him succeed in his aims. Emma knew she was the one who had warned against changing things, but the enticement kept growing stronger. Thinking of everything that had happened to her. . . to Henry. . .

 _Henry._ The name cut through her increasingly disordered thoughts like the crack of a whip. It struck her that if she went meddling like this, she would never meet Neal, and Henry would never exist. And while she was deeply tempted to erase Neal's part in her life and what he had done to her, she couldn't bring herself to edit him from existence entirely. And Henry. . . would it be better if he was never born? Cold-blooded as it was, for a moment she considered it. She had never been his mother, had refused even to hold him after his birth, and heaven knew he had cost her a great deal in maintenance fees, paid to the woman who had torn her from her own parents. But just as quickly, she dismissed it in horror. She could not delete him, she could not pretend he was merely that – remembered how Jafar had done the same thing to her in his imagined reality, and it had permanently crippled her, a wound never to heal or even close. Not to mention, if she took this path, she would never meet Captain Killian Jones, a man who had followed her to an imagined future and now to the genuine past, the other one she had lost and never been able to bear. No. She could not do to herself what her enemy had done, and call it victory.

Looking at Killian's face, she could see that he was coming to the same sobering conclusion, that they had to let Gold do now what he had already done in their own time, or risk losing everything. It must be even worse for him. After all, Gold had been his mortal enemy for years, and he was now faced with the prospect of stepping aside and letting him succeed – knowing it would ensure that he lost Liam, Milah, his hand, and God knew what else, that he drowned in all that hate and darkness. It seemed almost too cruel to ask, and Emma made a convulsive movement. "Killian. . . if you. . . if you don't. . ."

He gave her a small, weary smile. "I can't deny it's bloody tempting, love. _Bloody_ tempting. But no. No. I can't ask you to sacrifice your boy for me, or everything else that could come undone if I selfishly went after Gold now. It's. . . it's already happened to me, you see? So I know I'll make it through. Know that. . . that I'll meet you."

Emma was speechless. She had never even imagined that this sort of devotion could exist, this depth of sacrifice, his belief that he could stand all the horror of his life if at the end it would bring them together. She did not have the words to answer such a declaration, and any would have been insufficient. She reached out, took his face in her hands, brought their foreheads together, and then quietly, softly, tenderly, their lips.

Killian made a small noise in his throat, his good hand coming up to caress the back of her neck. Their heads turned, seeking a deeper fit, a bond that burned through her like raw lightning. She moaned, a thought fluttering inconsequentially in the back of her mind that she was unsure exactly how tolerant the present climate was to public displays of affection. Likely much more so than Victorian England, come to think. But even as she was thinking that she really was not interested in the minutiae of Tudor-era sexual morality, something strange happened – a sensation like being caught in a mighty fist, squeezed until the world blurred and she could no longer breathe, and spun around and around like a globe off its stand. She and Killian clung to each other, and when it faded, they were still standing in London mud. But yet again, the city had changed.

In place of the bustling commercial district on the bridge, there was only a single frail-looking span, and where crammed stone houses had sprawled on the green dells across the river, there was only much sparser settlement, thatched cots and crofts. Westminster Hall had become a fortified citadel, the Abbey was in some half-finished state of renovation with high wooden scaffolds enclosing what were not yet its distinctive gothic twin towers, and the sound of church bells called distantly through the mist. The air smelled peaty, rank, and wet. The streets were narrow and dark, and the banner flying over the palace was only the three golden lions on crimson, the fleur-de-lys having vanished. It took Emma only a moment of staring before she turned to Killian with an aghast expression. "We – did we just go back in time again? What did – how – "

"I was going to ask you, love. You didn't do that?"

"Of course not!" Emma supposed it was a fair question, as after all she had been responsible for temporally displacing them the first time, but she certainly hadn't done anything just now. At least, not consciously. She peered grimly at the forbidding labyrinth, trying to figure out how far this second jump had taken them. Another three hundred years? That would put them in the middle of the thirteenth century, which was obviously an even worse place for magic-users to end up. This was the time in which the Crusades had been at their height, a succession of warrior popes proclaiming the need for Christendom to cleanse itself within as well as without, and countless magicians had been persecuted and died alongside Cathars, heretics, Jews, Moors, mystics, and beguines, from the dungeons of the Inquisition in Carcassonne to the blood-soaked deserts of the Holy Land. To be sure, this era had also featured some of the fiercest criticism of the institutional church, the rise of mendicant orders and Antipopes, as well as the renowned medieval magicians Roger Bacon and Nicholas Flamel, but Emma did not think that would help them very much if they got caught up in the middle of a literal witch hunt. Assuming that they even stayed here, and didn't flux again. What had happened? Would they just keep randomly reverting backwards through time, in larger and larger chunks, until. . . nothing?

In any event, there was only one possible solution both to stop the time decay and provide any hope of getting them back where – and when – they needed to be. Emma turned to Killian and said urgently, "We need to find a gateway to the fae world. We need to get back there. Now."

"Aye, love, I was thinking the same. But if we're when we look to be, Hampton Court doesn't exist yet. And so, neither does its Traveller waypoint."

"Bloody hell." Emma hadn't realized that. "Is there another one in London?"

"There has to be, as obviously they came here before the sixteenth century. I haven't the foggiest idea where it is, though."

"Would you be able to find it? Sense it, or something?"

"Possibly, but it's a needle in a haystack, Swan. And judging by what just happened, we rather literally do not have the time to conduct a slow, painstaking search. Besides, by the time we bloody found it, we could have shifted again to an earlier time where it doesn't exist either, and that would be no use. We have to go somewhere that we know it'll be there, almost as far back as we can be thrown."

"What? Where?"

Killian paused for a moment, thinking hard. Then, tersely, he said, "Stonehenge."

* * *

The first order of business was to change their clothes. Emma hurried them down a dark warren where she was reasonably positive nobody could see them, then worked a spell, transforming Killian's black leather pirate getup into a chainmail hauberk, leather gambeson, and white tabard emblazoned with a red crusader's cross, boots, broadsword, and cloak. Her own apparel was revised to a long dress with gilted sleeves, a fur-trimmed surcote, toque headpiece and gauze veil, and a jeweled crucifix hanging from her belt; she figured that the more prosperous (and religious) they looked, the less likely they were to be stopped and questioned. She worked a second spell to make them able to understand and speak the early Middle English that was the dialect of the day, but getting out of the city was harder. Apparently it was God's Year 1257, which meant that the civil war between the incompetent King Henry III and his exasperated barons was at its peak, and a well-dressed stranger and his lady wife attempting to leave London (a hotbed of rebel sentiment) and abscond without explanation to Wiltshire was a prospect to raise serious skepticism. Was he a royal spy, or perhaps yet another of Queen Eleanor's powerful and universally loathed Savoyard relatives? Where _had_ he come from, anyway?

Emma, sensing trouble if this line of questioning was allowed to proceed, hastily suggested that they should be allowed to depart unmolested, her husband being a _croisier_ marked with the holy symbol and thus worthy of special deference. Rather surprisingly, this worked. The gatekeepers continued to eye them mistrustfully, but put up no further resistance as they hunted around for horses to buy or otherwise acquire. But these were not the easiest thing to come by, and as no self-respecting nobles would be departing the city on foot, Emma was once more forced to discreetly conjure up a matched pair of handsome chestnut coursers. It was getting dark, clouds closing ominously over the horned moon, and the wind was starting to keen as they finally rode through the gates, into the darkness of the wild dells beyond.

London swiftly vanished in the night behind them. The horses, being magical, were not subject to the limits of ordinary flesh-and-blood beasts, but it was still over eighty miles to Salisbury, no pleasure jaunt, and Emma was increasingly aware of a distant ringing in her ears, a slow building of the same pressure that had forced them out of the sixteenth century to this one. She had a distinct and terrible feeling that the magic of the third bottle was well and truly out of control, that she had no way to stop what she had unleashed, and perhaps strong surges of emotion – such as when she had kissed Killian, overwhelmed by his willingness to endure the tragedy of his life for her – made it even more powerful. So she _was_ the one still driving them adrift, against the very grain of space and time, and if she couldn't find a way to dam the deluge. . .

There was a faint flush of warning red in the east by the time they, saddle-sore and hungry and exhausted, crested a hill and gazed down at the ancient keep of Old Sarum below, set high on its motte and circled by a crown of twisted yew trees. Stonehenge was only a few miles from here, but Emma felt as if her bones were being liquefied, deformed and pulverized by the force of the time-shift magic struggling to get out. And if she had held it back this long, the blast would carry them far away geographically as well, far from where they needed to be, from any hope of salvation. She bent over on her horse's back, gagging. "I can't," she gasped. "I can't. . ."

"Swan?" Alarmed, Killian dismounted and hurried to her, just as she slid off the saddle and into his arms. "Swan, love, Emma. It's not much further. You can do it, I've got you. Come on, let's go, let's go."

With that, he scooped her up and carried her back to his horse, slinging her astride and climbing up behind her. Kicked it into motion, holding her tight around the waist. She wanted nothing more than to give herself to the comfort and adoration of his embrace, but did not dare, fearful of setting off the trigger. Sparks popped in front of her eyes, and her ears rushed and roared. Couldn't make it there, couldn't. Was on the verge of turning into a giant pillar of flame, a magical pyre, incinerated to nothing and then even beyond –

Reality was starting to behave very peculiarly indeed by the time they galloped up one last swell and down the plain to the circle of standing stones, the great sarsens and lintels keeping their eternal vigil. The ground shifted and shook, trees appeared and disappeared, and shadows raced past too fast to see, the ghosts of ancient folk living and dying in a blink. Sometimes it was day, and sometimes night, the stars and moon cycling through various configurations in the heavens as if seen through a broken kaleidoscope. It was snowing heavily one moment, the chill biting them to the bone, and the next, golden summer sunlight warmed them back to life. There was a high, eerie chanting that might have been druids, and the next, only screaming.

Killian reached the edge of the circle, leaped off the horse, and caught Emma, holding her as the magical maelstrom screamed around them, reaching out its arms to embrace them, calling them to jump. He clutched at the silver crucifix around his neck, trying to find the Traveller waypoint, the gate into the fae world. Blood dripped from the stones and then vanished, and even their solid forms were beginning to lose coherence, warping and wavering in the face of the onslaught. The world itself might contract on them, revert into a marble of dark matter and then nothing, if they didn't – if they couldn't –

Something shifted, something opened. Killian yelled in Emma's ear, pulling her toward it – both of them running as best they could on ground that was barely earth, tilting wrongly beneath their feet – building up speed, throwing themselves toward the crack, thundering madness –

And then, just as swiftly: silence.

They lay sprawled, wheezing, as reality began to sort and fix itself back into the accustomed dimensions. But something was different, as they could tell at once. They were no longer in Britain. The sunlight had a strange silver quality to it, an intoxicating ecstasy, the air clear and sharp as crystal. As they sat up, still panting, and looked around, a scene of unimaginable beauty met their eyes.

So this, then, was the fae world at the height of its splendor, how it had looked before Robert Gold's dark magic devastated it, when it had been capable of meeting or overmatching any rivals, the reason that a jealous magician would want either to steal its power or bring it down for good. The trees' leaves were not merely green, but a flashing medley of colors, changing with the wind. The ground sloped down to a river of quicksilver, a bridge spanning it, and on the far side, a city of glass and gold rose into the impossibly blue sky. The castle at the crown of the hill commanded the eye, built of snow-white stone with turrets capped in hammered bronze, and seeing it, Emma felt a sudden, inexplicable shock of recognition hit her in the gut like a fist. _I was born there. This is the place I was supposed to rule. This is what I am the princess of, not a shadowed, broken revenant. This is what it was – could be. If I brought it back. If I was strong enough._

"Bloody hell." Killian got unsteadily to his feet. "Well, love, we made it. Suppose they've sent out any search parties to welcome their lost princess home?"

Emma tried to answer, but the words were still stuck in her throat. She just looked and looked, overcome. Finally she managed, "This – this is what Gold and Regina destroyed? H-how could they?"

"It doesn't make me feel particularly fondly toward either of them, aye." Killian glanced around. "Speaking of which, we don't know how far away that is. If we're caught here when the Dark Curse hits, that would be catastrophic. We need to sort out the muddled timelines, be sure we know when Gold is and what we can or cannot let him do, and make sure you have enough power to return to the present and stop Jafar. And as before, be very careful not to be seen. We're still in the past, but now it's _your_ past, and any changes could affect you, or your existence. We can't. . . confuse the issue."

Emma paused, then nodded. Having recovered her breath, she reached for his arm, and they took a step, intending to start the descent down to the bridge and cross into the city. But just then, the ground began to shake, and they jerked back and clutched each other, fearful that another time-shift – or worse – was in the offing. Yet in a few more moments, its origin proved to be quite mundane. Just the reverberations of hooves, belonging to the two horses that appeared over the hill and charged down to face them. And the two riders –

One was a man, the other a woman. The former was blonde, tall and handsome, wearing a fur-trimmed red cloak and hammered breastplate, a sword strapped at his waist. The latter had long black hair, and was costumed in some white riding outfit, with a fitted jacket and trousers split beneath a quilted skirt. She also had a bow and arrow, which she was already in the process of pointing at them. "Who are you, and what are you doing in our lands?"

Emma opened her mouth, then shut it. She was about to demand that they answer it first when Killian, who had taken one look at them and frozen up, stepped hard on her foot. "Charles," he said. "Prince Charles. We're just passing through. No harm at all. We'll be on our way."

"Prince Charles, is it? Prince of where?" The man squinted at him suspiciously, then turned to Emma. "What's your name?"

"Leia," Emma said, improvising on the spot, stealing a name from the heroine of a popular Covent Garden theater show. "Princess Leia. We're. . . just. . . we're just. . ."

She fished in vain for any feasible explanation as to what they could possibly be doing, glancing back at Killian frantically, trying to work out how on earth he could recognize them. But just then – at once – she knew.

He had been in Regina's vault. Must have seen them down there, and worked out who they were. Where they were, at the current moment, asleep and enchanted, as they had been for decades – but here, in the time before the curse, real and present and very much awake.

It was them. It had to be.

Snow and Charming.

Her parents.


	30. Chapter 30

As she stumbled down the steep embankment, forced to keep pace with Snow or risk being dragged – her wrists had been tied with a rope that had been then knotted around the princess' saddle horn, and Charming had applied similar measures to Killian – Emma nonetheless could not stop staring. Not just at these strangers who theoretically were her mother and father, but at everything. The brief and fragmented glimpses she had had of the fae world had all been of a permanent night, a broken city, a grim monolith of a palace keeping watch over the unquiet ghosts, and she simply could not take in the magnitude of the change. Not this place with its massive old trees, streets paved in rosy cobbles, elaborate windows and filigreed arches, balconies and turrets and gables, everything well kept and prosperous, and the glister and gleam of magic everywhere. An old man conjuring beautiful fist-sized butterflies for children to chase; a water nymph taking form in a fountain to blow a kiss at a passing gallant (he shouldn't snap his head around so fast, Emma thought wryly, he might strain something); enticing smells or sounds drifting from narrow lanes, and swinging shingles of every sort of merchant, from ordinary greengrocers and cobblers to a shop window piled high with thick leather-bound grimoires. One of them was open to a page where its text floated off, twisted and transformed itself into inky little figures bobbing in midair, and then into a shifting tapestry of background scenes as the figures acted out the stories or demonstrated the spells contained within the book. Emma was fascinated, lingering by the window – until there was a hard jerk on her wrists, and she nearly fell.

"Hey!" That was Killian, turning angrily to Snow. "Leave off, she's just curious! She has a right to look – is this how you treat all the visitors to your kingdom?"

"No," Charming said, glowering down at the pirate. "Only the ones who turn up on a dangerous border fairly reeking of uncontrolled magic, with no good explanation for how they got there and no straight story as to where they're from or why they've come or even exactly who they are. Unless, _Charles,_ you'd like to save us all some time and explain?"

"I'd never have tried to save you if I'd known you were such a bloody idiot," Killian mumbled, quietly enough that only Emma could hear him. Louder, he said, "Your Royal Mightiness, this will likely sail directly over your head like a witty comment, well-turned phrase, or indeed the point itself – unless you can fit a brain in that impressively chiseled chin – but still. I know you don't have a good reason to, just as we have a good reason we can't tell you who we are, but you're still going to have to trust us."

Charming and Snow exchanged a look. Her hand twitched as if about to reach for the bow slung on her back, and Killian tensed, shifting his weight – he was clearly not eager to fight them, or do anything that might interfere with their presumed forthcoming production of Emma – but at the same time, he could not permit the two of them to be whisked off to some miserable dungeon. Then Snow said, "Regina. You're working for her, aren't you? I don't know what she's trying to accomplish, but she's not going to get away with – "

"A curse. That's what she's planning."

Charming, Snow, and Killian all swiveled around in unison, and Emma felt mildly surprised at herself for speaking up, but she stood firm. "A curse," she repeated, addressing her mother directly. "Under the influence of Robert Gold, Regina is going to cast a dark curse, and it will wipe out this place entirely. See this? All of it? It's going to be destroyed. The magic of this world will be almost eradicated, weakened and shackled, so it can't challenge Gold. Only the Night Market will be left, and its days are numbered too. As for you and your people, you'll be swept away as well, to Regina's vault in her manor in Yorkshire, in England, and put into enchanted, perpetual sleep. Your newborn daughter will get out just in time through the wardrobe network, but she'll. . . she'll never know who you are or why you left her. It's going to happen, believe me. And you – and we – can't change it."

The prince and princess exchanged a second look, this one understandably thunderstruck. "How could you – " Snow breathed. "How could you possibly know that?"

"I just do." Emma's heart was sore. "Trust me."

Charming loosened his sword in the scabbard. "Not if we ride off right now and find Regina. She can't cast a curse or hurt anyone else if she's dead."

"Wait," Snow said. "No, no we can't. This could be some kind of other plot. Maybe she wants us to do just that, leap at the bait to accuse her of this. Regina can't – she wouldn't – "

"She's a monster, Snow! A monster, and she needs to be stopped, if there's any chance we're going to have the life we've worked so hard to build. Look at this. Our kingdom." Charming swept a hand at the streets, the castle on the hill, the flowering vines, the brilliant sun. "Do you think we can step aside and let it be destroyed, if there's any chance we could stop it?"

Snow opened and shut her mouth. As she was distracted, Emma tried to move around the horse to get closer to Killian; she didn't know what she might have done by telling the truth, felt weak and watery-kneed, and wanted the comfort of his arms. He likewise seemed to be attempting to sidle closer to her, twisting the ropes on his wrists until he could lift them over her head and gather her awkwardly into his embrace. She nuzzled into him, nose tucked into the hollow of his throat, closing her eyes in a fierce attempt to regather her composure. "Did I – did I ruin it?"

"Hush, love. It's all right. We'll get out of this together. You did what you thought you must." He touched their foreheads lightly, then their noses, mouths brushing in the quick ghost of a kiss. "Brave lass. Shh."

Emma bit her lip, smiling tremulously at him, and was about to force herself to pull away when Charming turned around from the argument, saw the two of them together, and momentarily looked both surprised and sympathetic. "Well," he said, clearing his throat. "I suppose you wouldn't have told us that outright if you were trying to lead us astray. Come on. We'll take you to the castle, and then we'll. . . and then we'll talk."

This was indeed what transpired. Emma and Killian were untied, led up the road to the castle, and allowed to wash and freshen up, before being shown into Charming and Snow's private solar. They were awaiting their visitors in stiff formality, and the tension lingered until Killian swept a dashing bow and Emma followed with a rather clumsy curtsy. This was sufficient to break some of the ice, and Charming offered them cups of wine from a golden tray. "Have you never been to Misthaven before?" he asked, seeing Emma staring around at the high windows, the lacework ribbing of the ceiling and the slender fluted columns, the doors that opened onto a balcony overlooking the royal gardens. "That surprises me. You have the look of one of ours."

"I was – I was born here." Emma's hand shook as she accepted the wine, splashing it. "I grew up in England. Misthaven – is that what this world is called?"

"It's gone by many names over time. Eden, Elysian, Valhalla, Avalon, Shangri-La, and so forth – or simply Faerie. The people of the other side, no matter where they're from, always have stories of a wondrous land they stumbled into, the place their ancestors came from or where they hope to return when they die. That's here." Charming shrugged, rather apologetically. "But yes, at present it's called Misthaven. The other ones seemed a bit too grandiose for us."

"It's beautiful." Emma wanted to say something else, but it had gotten stuck in her throat. She was once more fighting the terrible compulsion to just give in, to tell him to stop Regina, to make sure the curse was never cast. But every time she glanced at Killian, stalwartly at her side as ever, she couldn't do it. Couldn't change everything, to mean they would never find each other. "So, Your Highness – "

"Please. Call me Charming. Or. . . or David."

"David." She couldn't quite get her tongue unironically around "Charming," even if it seemed this man might well live up to it. It was stunning how much kinship she already felt with him, the way they seemed intrinsically similar, and for a girl who had never known where she had come from, never seen or spoken to any previous generation of her family, it was heart-wrenching. "About what. . . about what I told you earlier, with Regina and the curse. You can't stop it."

David smiled, clearly not believing her but resolved to be polite. "That may be what you think, Leia, and if you've had the misfortune of crossing paths with Regina before, I'm sure it's a well-founded opinion. But we still can, if you swear that this is not some trick or trap, some – "

"No. That's not what I mean." Emma clenched her fingernails into her palms, hard enough to leave a mark. "I mean that you can't, because you don't. I know you don't. Because in the world. . . in the time that I grew up in. . . it's been that way for years."

Her words fell into a sudden hush, as both Snow and Killian glanced around at them. David, for his part, looked first completely stunned, then slowly and awfully comprehending. "You," he said, blinked, rubbed a hand across his face, and shook his head. "Are you saying. . . are you saying you're. . ."

"From the future?" Emma didn't know if she was saving them, or was in the process, right now, of damning herself, of making the very choices that were the reason she had grown up alone, unwanted and unloved. The lost girl inside her screamed for her to stop, but the grown woman, holding back her own tears, had to, one more time, send her away. "Yes. We are."

David still looked flattened. "If that's so – do we – do we know you there? Does it – the curse – get broken?"

Emma hesitated. "No. And no."

"Then why would we let this happen?" David crushed a fist into his palm, spinning away in exasperation and fear. "What motive would you even have to do this? Maybe Snow's right, you're trying to trick us, confuse us into fighting some imaginary threat so Regina can do something else behind our – "

"Mate." It was Killian who spoke this time. "I know it sounds bloody awful, and of course you want to fight it as hard as you can. But let me ask you this. Have you ever heard of Robert Gold?"

David's face went still. "If that is who I suspect he is, then yes."

"He goes by another name here, I imagine? Wouldn't do to get things muddied up, connect the deeds of one to the other. Regina's teacher, the one for whose ultimate benefit this curse is. Ring any bells?"

"Yes," David said darkly. "You're speaking of Rumplestiltskin."

Emma thought back to that glittering, giggling fey demon they had encountered in Jafar's house in Paris, the blurred and warped version of Gold that had taken all the dark magic of the _arthame_ into himself. _Rumplestiltskin._ The name seemed to fit. She imagined that he crossed quite frequently between Misthaven and England – or rather that he had, back when (such as now) there was a Misthaven to cross _to._ Maintaining personas and possessions in each, the respectable President of the Royal Society living in Kensington Palace on the one hand, and Rumplestiltskin the dread sorcerer on the other, with his Dark Castle loaded with dangerous and arcane treasures. Yet even with all that magic, it hadn't been enough to find Neal, the one human thing Gold had left in him to want. That was when he decided on the curse, collecting Misthaven's power for himself, and shutting that door so he would no longer have to waste his time trawling through both worlds. If one of them was permanently walled off, that meant Neal would have to be in the other, and Misthaven was the far easier target. That was the price they had paid. All of them.

"Rumplestiltskin?" That was Snow, frowning. _"Rumplestiltskin's_ doing this?"

"Ah, my lady, so you do know him." Killian smiled, without humor. "If it comes to your choice – the three of you – that you want to stop him, I cannot in honor interfere or say otherwise." He swallowed hard, eyes on Emma, and she knew it was killing him to even offer the chance for them never to meet – but also that if she decided she wanted to grow up with her parents as a princess, the life she should have had, he would not stop her. That it had to be her heart they followed, not his.

"Even so," Killian went on, "I am passing familiar with the man, and I will say only this. If he's thwarted in this endeavor, he won't admit defeat and go peaceably away. He'll come up with another and even more terrible plan, and this time he will be sure there are no loose ends. As it is now, the curse will result in Misthaven being damaged and darkened and thrown into ruin, but not completely destroyed. It could still be rebuilt, though at slow and laborious cost. If Gold has to take a second crack at this curse, it won't be. Also in the current setup, you're still alive – just in eternal, ageless sleep. Theoretically you could be woken up, and resume your lives more or less where they left off – though with some changes, of course. But we don't know how to break it. Is there any magical item you can think of, any spell, any sorcerer anywhere in this realm who might be able to tell us how?"

Charming looked troubled. "The only one I can think of who might be even close to what you're asking is Merlin, and he vanished years ago. Decades. No living soul has ever seen him."

Emma felt that like a punch in the gut. Was she going to have to choose between her parents and Killian – not to mention Henry? If that was the final word, even if they ever got back to England in their own time, there would never be any way to wake her parents up. She could visit them in the vault and sit by their glass coffins every day as she aged and they did not; they would still be young and sleeping when she died an old woman. If she'd never known them, it should make them easier to give up, to be assured of having her pirate and her son, but it didn't. She stood silent, stricken.

"But," Snow said. "Charming, you're forgetting something. True love's kiss."

Killian abruptly went quite still. "Say what?"

"True love's kiss," Snow repeated. "It's how he saved _me_ after Regina's sleeping curse. If you love them and they love you, you will always find each other, and there is no stronger magic in this or any world than true love. No curse capable of withstanding it. It will work." Her gaze searched first Emma, then Killian. For a moment, as her eyes flicked back to the former, Emma was sure she saw a dawning awareness in them – that Snow had, without a word spoken outright, guessed just who she might be. In that, Emma ached beyond words to simply admit it, to tell them it _was_ her, to embrace them once, if that was the only chance she was ever going to have. But she couldn't. If she reached beyond her wall, if she let down her fortifications now, God knew what she would do – or wouldn't. Might not be strong enough. And so she did not move.

"So, then," Killian said, glancing determinedly away from Emma. "Even if that does work, we'd need to get back there first, and we came through in a bit of. . . disruption on the other side. In short, there was a great deal of time slippage going on, and if we just popped back out where we went in, it could be we'd emerge right in the middle of it. Is there a place, a portal you could take us to – something that might be more stable? As well, there's the fact that there's one and likely two sorcerers wreaking bloody red havoc on London or Paris or wherever else. After all, even if Gold is in the past, it's likely not _this_ time in the past anymore. And so he could well be back in our own time already and doing as he likes, unopposed."

"There is one place," Charming said slowly. "But it isn't entirely stable either. That's why there's so much disparity in the other side's stories of running into us. You can come out – or go in – nearly anywhere, or any _when._ You need quite a bit of magical ability to steer."

"You can do that, love." Killian looked seriously at Emma. "You can send us back to our right place and time. I know you can."

She didn't answer. She wanted to believe him, but she did not in fact know that she could. It was true that she had sent them back in time originally, but she had had no clear destination in mind. They'd ended up first in Tudor London, and then the time decay had pushed them even further back, at random. There were no guarantees she could stop or even control it if it started happening again, how much further she might unravel the warp and weft of reality – but she also knew there was no other choice. If she wanted any hope of saving her parents, of seeing Henry again, of knowing that her decisions had meant something, that this unthinkable sacrifice was worth it, they had to. Stop Gold. Stop Jafar. Break the curse. One on its own seemed impossible, far less all three. But they were long past the point of no return.

"All right," Emma said quietly. "Take us."

* * *

They were not bound and marched as prisoners this time. They were given their own horses to ride alongside Snow and Charming, quickly leaving the city behind and cantering into the countryside – which was, if anything, even more beautiful. The shadows were getting long, slanting in deep golden and dusky violet hues, catching iridescent prisms in the western sun and under the eaves of the verdant trees. The air was so clear that it might chime if tapped with a tuning fork, and rivers lay gleaming like beaten silver in the valleys. Emma kept thinking she heard laughter in the distance, a sound of pure delight – and a sound not quite human, as if the land itself was giving voice. Once more, the thought of leaving this place to be ravaged by the curse seared her to the core.

At last, as the sun had gone and night was falling in truth, they urged their horses up one more long dell, to the rocky promontory at the top. From here they could see for miles in every direction, a land untouched by factories and machines and squabbling magicians, and Emma realized that Killian was looking just as hard as her, trying to memorize everything as it was now so that back in their own time, they might have some chance of knowing what they had to restore. As well, this was his ancestral homeland as much as hers, albeit several generations further distant through his mother's fae Traveller blood. Perhaps it called as seductively to him as it did to her, feeling as if she had six or seven or eight senses, as if this place breathed, knew, wept, remembered. As if nothing mattered but that she save it somehow. Anyhow.

"Here," Charming said, swung off his horse, and held Emma's stirrup as she dismounted. "The gate's just there, in the cave." He pointed to an opening among the tumbled stones, oddly and sepulchrally black in the fading light. "No more than a hundred paces in. Be. . . be careful."

She searched his face in desperate hunger, almost physically unable to contain the words that wanted to burst out. "Why. . . why are you trusting us? To do this? To save you? Not that I'm not grateful, but. . . even if you do believe that we are from the future and know what's going to happen, that doesn't necessarily include putting your lives, _your_ futures, in our hands and. . ."

Charming started to answer, stopped, then frowned, as if wondering exactly when his previous low opinion of them had been revised. "I don't know," he said at last. "I suppose you could still be lying, but. . . you're not. Our future is your present, Leia. And if you're there, we'll take the risk."

 _Emma,_ she wanted to tell him. _My name is Emma. That's what you'll call your daughter, and she will never see your face._ She yearned desperately to throw herself into his arms, to bury herself in his shoulder, to have a little girl's much-loved papa chase the monsters away, until she could feel herself shaking with the force of it. "All right," she managed. "Let's. . . let's go. No time to waste. Literally."

"Aye." Charming seemed just as reluctant, had to shake himself out of it. As she took a step, he caught her by the arm. Lowering his voice, he added, "I know this may not be my place, but are you sure that Charles fellow is good enough for you? Looks a bit of a shady character. Not sure I entirely approve."

Emma choked on a laugh. "He's the best," she said. "I won't be able to do this without him. I think you'll get along one day."

Charming looked as if this, out of all the extraordinary things he had recently heard, was the one he found it impossible to believe, but nodded politely. He and Snow led the way to the cave, Emma and Killian falling into step behind them, and ducked under the low roof, small ivory stalactites serrating the entrance like the teeth of a great mouth. "Just down there," Charming said, pointing to the eerie glow at the end of the passage. "We don't dare go any further. We'll leave you here. Good luck."

Emma could only nod. She grasped each of their hands in turn, squeezing hard, then let go. Took Killian's arm instead, pressing herself close into his side, as they started to walk like Orpheus and Eurydice leaving the underworld, knowing what would become of them if they looked back. Their footsteps echoed. It wasn't too late. There were mere moments left in which to change her mind, but they were there. She could still turn back.

They reached the end of the passage, and regarded the glow – a milky, shifting vapor – in mutual trepidation. They could almost make out their faces, as if reflected in a clouded mirror, but not quite, and there was no way to be sure what lay on the other side. If they'd even get the chance to be certain, or if the unstable time flux would continue and accelerate. If that happened, not only they but everyone and everything, everywhere, would be done for, and without either Gold or Jafar lifting a finger. That was why time travel magic remained so dangerous and verboten, an issue not just of political and social power and who was trying to change things and for what purpose, but of possibly destroying all of existence, like a chain of tipped-over dominoes. Once the reaction began, there was no way to stop it, and things had already been coming apart at the seams right before they jumped through Stonehenge. If it had gotten any worse, there might not be an England to return to. No Europe, either. No Earth.

Pushing away these apocalyptic scenarios, Emma took a deep breath and flexed her fingers, focusing as hard as she could on London. Conjured the image, held it as clearly as she could in her mind, then imposed it on the opaque, swirling smoke in front of her.

All at once it changed color and character, the unearthly glow growing brighter and brighter. A blurry image bearing some resemblance to Westminster appeared in the center, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. She could certainly see Big Ben, the spires of the Houses of Parliament, the towers of the Abbey – yet even as it was crystallizing into clarity, the image was starting to crack, hair-thin fractals multiplying and racing across it as if a rock had been thrown into a window, smashing the glass without breaking it outright. Now, they had to go now, or the moment would be lost. Possibly forever.

Emma reached behind her, groping, and got hold of Killian's hook, clutching it tight – wherever they jumped, wherever they landed, she was taking no chances of going without him. Then as the light built to its zenith, flashing and dazzling, and the pace of the cracks increased, they took a running start and flung themselves headlong.

As in all their previous temporo-spatial dislocations, the pressure and chaos were unspeakably intense, whirling and rattling like a pebble down a well, somersaulting and spinning over and over. Then they hit something very hard, knocking their wind out, and the world whisked back into place above them, like a curtain dropped at the end of a play. But even before she could gather herself sufficiently to sit up and look around, Emma knew something was wrong. The noise, the lights, the large boxy machines racing past, the unfamiliar buildings and flashing signs. It was London beyond a doubt, she could see Big Ben directly above and across from them, but a strange, mechanical, futuristic one, crowded and loud and cold, everyone attached to some sort of small glowing screen, tapping on or talking to it, and more of the machines – almost like train cars, but driven by themselves – were thronging by on the road. Horseless carriages? There had been prototypes imagined for personal vehicles powered with steam, but those had been derided as an expensive and impractical fantasy that would never come to pass. But this –

Next to her, Killian pushed himself upright, staring. "Swan, where the blazes are we?"

"London, but – " Emma felt her stomach sinking like a rock. "This isn't the right time. We didn't go back again, we went. . . forward. Too far."

"So it means the time decay didn't destroy the world, eh? We just need to jump back a bit." Killian got to his feet, wincing. "Can you sense if there's still the portal here, love? Would rather bloody avoid another jaunt to Stonehenge if we can help it."

Emma turned around to survey what they had just fallen out of – it was a grey wall alongside something called the Westminster Underground tube station, and the people tromping by in their odd clothes were already giving them dirty looks for blocking the way out. So she and Killian nipped out of the crush, as a great red conveyance called the London Big Bus Tour rumbled past and someone on the double decker pointed down at them. Before they left Misthaven, Emma had magicked them into more appropriate clothes for their return to their own time, rather than the medieval lord and lady getup they had been wearing to blend into the thirteenth century. But now their outfits looked like fancy costumes, antique and elaborate, jarringly out of place. Did everyone dress like slobs and wear trousers now? Apparently so.

Not that this mattered. She just had to concentrate and get them out of here. But as she held up her hands, there was none of the familiar tingle and burn of flowing power, the golden glow of channeled aether. Her fingers remained silent and dark. Nothing out of the ordinary happened at all.

Feeling panic start to eat up her focus, Emma tried harder, straining and clawing, but still nothing. And as she stared at her traitorous hands, something even more terrible occurred to her. Jafar had said that he intended on creating a future where all magic belonged to him, where he was the sole and supreme wielder. Was this it, then? A world where he had succeeded, and there was no magic left of any kind, where even the memory of it ever existing had been scrubbed out? If so, they had arrived too late. Had missed their chance for good, landing in this modern London of metal and glass and machines, harsh lights and jostling crowds.

 _Our future is your present,_ Charming had said. Except now it wasn't. They must be at least a hundred and fifty years ahead of their own 1851, which would make it – Emma didn't know, 2001, 2011, later? Her parents could still be asleep in that vault in Applewood Hall up north – or, like the rest of the world's magic, it could have been snuffed out, solving the dilemma of the curse being broken by it ceasing to exist at all. A world that had no more place for it. Only gears. Only wheels. Steam, but no sorcery. And no chance, ever, of getting back.

Emma felt as if she was about to be sick. Was drawing short fruitless gulps, clutching onto a worried Killian's arms. _We failed. Failed. I'll never see them again. Any of them._ In all the other alternate realities she had toured recently, their one common denominator was that they were magical, and hence there was always the opportunity of reversing it. But this was no alternate dimension. This was their own world. There was nowhere else to go. Whether or not this had come about through his direct agency, Jafar had won. No more Royal Society. No more Night Market. No more magicians of any kind. No more magic.

 _Failed. Failed. Failed._ Snow and Charming had believed in her. Trusted her to save them. Accepted the terrible ordeal of the curse now, the destruction of their kingdom, in hopes that she would break it and reunite them later. And that had been a grave and irreparable mistake. She would never see them – or for that matter, Henry – again. Never. Never.

Emma turned away, went to her knees, and threw up.


	31. Chapter 31

"Swan." Killian's voice sounded urgently in her ear as he knelt alongside her, shielding her from the curious stares of passersby, holding her hard against him. "Shh, Emma love. No, no, it's all right, we'll sort this out. We're still together, we'll find a way. You'll see your parents, your lad again. We'll get home. I promise."

"How?" Emma croaked. "We can't get out of here, I can't do anything, I'm powerless. There's no magic, there's no way we can – "

"I bloody refuse to believe that there is no drop of magic anywhere. I don't care how thorough Jafar or anyone thinks they were at stomping it out. It's a tenacious thing, a force of nature – you can no more erase it entirely than you could wipe out the sky or the wind or the weather. It's gone far away underground where it can't be easily tapped, especially in a place as industrial as this, but it's here. I'll wager our lives on it. We just have to calm down, think a bit, and come up with a plan."

Some of the screaming in Emma's head abated the smallest fraction. "You – you think so?" she choked. "That we can?"

"I know so. We haven't come this far through all the nonsense we've dealt with, just to be thwarted now. It'll be an adventure, eh? Something to tell your boy. Come on now, lass. Up you get."

Emma still felt shaky and ill, but allowed him to get his hand and hook under her elbows and hoist her to her feet. She clutched at his lapels, trusting him more than her own knees to hold her upright just then, but as the first instinctive, incinerating panic started to recede, she felt somewhat clearer-headed, not eager to confront the magnitude of their challenge, but inspired by his insistence that it was not impossible. As well, she was sorely tempted to finally blurt out the words that had been lingering in the back of her head, that had become harder and harder to ignore or hold down throughout the course of this wild and dangerous adventure, but that was precisely why she could not say them. The balance was delicate enough, could easily be overturned into the abyss, and she could not do anything to further shift it. As long as she held her breath, did not disturb a leaf on great Yggdrasil, the World-Tree that connected the realms (and she wondered by now how many of them she had visited) and kept her head down, perhaps she could avoid that final bolt from the heavens that she dreaded, the one that took him away from her forever. Against all odds, they were still together, having fallen through an impossible plethora of space and time and magic, and there was nothing she would do to endanger it.

"All right," she said, gulping down one last unsteady breath and throwing her head back, squaring her shoulders and meeting his eyes. "What do we do first?"

It would, as it appeared to them, either have to be money or disguise. Bereft of the ability to simply click her fingers and conjure up more appropriate clothes, Emma had to think how to come by them the old-fashioned way, and as she and Killian took hands and cautiously ventured into the heart of this new London, she increasingly realized that stealing them did not seem to be an option, even for two professionals of their considerable skills. There were strange gates and beeping devices and mechanical eyes that showed images on screens, technologies they did not understand, and as being arrested by whatever the Met had become would prove actively counterproductive to their aims, they needed a more subtle strategy.

It ended up falling into their laps rather by accident. After the fourth or fifth time someone stopped them to tell them how much they liked their costumes and to ask if they could have a picture, Killian, with his unerring instinct for turning a profit, realized this was the one useful asset they could monetize. They found their way to Hyde Park, set up shop with some of the other buskers plying their talents, and went to work. Emma pessimistically supposed that they would be lucky to come away with a few pounds for a full day's effort, but she had reckoned without the bees-to-the-honeycomb effect that Killian had on apparently every passing woman, regardless of age, background, marital status, or any other mitigating factor. She struggled not to feel jealousy, reminding herself that this was a practical economic transaction borne out of dire necessity and that he had no eyes for any of them except her, but that did not mean she enjoyed watching these coarse modern hussies cozy up to _her_ pirate, nearly drooling down his shirt (which, to be entirely fair, did not cover as much as it could in the first place). At least they were making money hand over fist.

At last, when they had a suitable sum, the next difficulty was sorting out how it worked. There were moments of considerable confusion and frustration at first, but they soon worked out that the standard was indeed quite a bit simpler than their own vast and complicated array of guineas and crowns, pounds and pence, shillings and groats – all the assorted coinage England had accumulated over a thousand years and finally got round to sorting out in this simple decimalized system: a hundred pence to the pound, with 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 and £2 coins, and paper notes for the larger denominations. Killian was disappointed to discover that large golden doubloons were no longer legal tender, as paying with a plain old £20 note did not have quite the same pizzazz, but as long as it got the job done, that was all Emma cared about. Pocketing their loot, they went in search of a tailor.

They got their next surprise to discover that one such individual was not in fact needed. Rather than buying bolts of cloth and then having someone turn it into garments for you, you could instead buy the finished product directly from the shelf, no extra time needed at all. They ventured cautiously into an establishment called Primark, populated by scandalously under-dressed salespeople with talking devices plugged into their ears, and were bewildered by the intimidating mélange of large glossy signs, harsh lights, and unfamiliar clothing. But as neither of them were the sort to back down from a challenge, or be overly starstruck by new and strange surroundings, they faced up to their task with martial determination. They both picked out new leather jackets – Killian's black as usual, Emma's red – shirts, boots, and then, Emma deciding to take full advantage of the fact that it was socially acceptable for ladies to wear trousers now, a certain make of them called jeans. She struggled in the fitting room to make sense of the fastenings and buttons, the toothy metal thing that did up the front, as Killian called from outside, "Come on, Swan. Let's have a look."

Still not entirely satisfied with the result, Emma rolled her eyes and unlatched the door, stepping out – whereupon her eyes went wide at the sight before her. "You look. . ."

"I know." He raised a cheeky dark eyebrow, smirking, but his attention was on her, surveying her with frank admiration from head to heel. "Oh now. That's _much_ better. Marvelous. I feel myself appreciating this century's peculiar sartorial sensibilities more and more by the instant. Having difficulties with the zipper though, love?"

"Zip – ?" Emma glanced down at herself and the mostly (but not quite) done-up metal teeth. "That's what this thing is called?"

"So far as I gather. Can't be worse than a corset. Much as I appreciate it, just give it a firm tug the rest of the way, then do that top button. Can't have you walking around like that, can we? Might cause a terrible accident."

Emma gave him an arched eyebrow of her own as she did as instructed. Her legs felt remarkably free and light, almost shockingly so, even though she of course had been no prude or pearl-clutching spinster. It was liberating to feel this way, empowering, as if she could actually do what was before them, and she couldn't help needling him back. "Oh? I'm sure your newfound expertise in how to get it up was born mostly from an interest of how to get it _down,_ sailor."

"That isn't any trouble in either department, my love." He stepped close enough to give her a quick peck of a kiss, playful but serious underneath. "If you've still got those things on when we get home, I'll happily prove it."

 _When we get home._ She had never heard such a powerful promise so matter-of-factly given, as if there was no question or doubt in his mind that when they had sorted out the current crisis and made it to some fleeting safety or sanctuary, he would thrill and impress her with his knowledge of zippers and how to remove them to her heart's content, but he would not be distracted or tempted off course by anything, internal or external, until then. She bit her lip, running a hand over his chest, comforting herself with the nearness of him, until she stepped away. "All right," she said. "What do we do with our old clothes? Just. . . leave them behind?"

"They're collectors' items in this time, I imagine they're worth something. And we still need to buy these, so we can't get rid of them just yet. Come on."

They changed back and took the new clothes to the shop till to pay, as the cashier made some admiring remark about their current apparel and Killian spun back with an easy, extemporaneous lie about them being actors here to promote a new play, but the airships had mislaid their steamer trunks and they did not want to be stuck in these until said trunks got here. The cashier giggled appreciatively, sympathized that Heathrow was really terrible about losing luggage these days and last time she went on holiday it was a fortnight until her suitcases made it home, and handed them two bags with their new outfits inside. Then, with one more appreciative look at Killian, she waved them out.

Back on the busy streets, Killian and Emma searched for a suitable place to change, finally taking turns in a public convenience that demanded 50p as the price of each use. When they emerged, they looked much less out of place, standing on the tree-lined river walk overlooking the Thames, crossed by steel bridges and plied by a variety of passenger and cargo barges. There was a vast slow-turning wheel on the south bank (the London Eye, the banner read) that people appeared to climb into for views over the city, but they did not have time for sightseeing – hard as it was to repress a natural burning curiosity about this slick, strange non-magical future. Old clothes stuffed into the bags, they set off to find somewhere to sell them.

After they had endured several hours of unsuccessful perambulation, trying their best not to jump or indeed look in any way perturbed by the blinking, beeping, blaring metropolis, Emma dropped onto a park bench, exhausted and discouraged. "I don't know, maybe we shouldn't get rid of them just yet. We might need more money if we're here for a while, and nobody will pay to make pictures with us if we're just ordinary. Besides, it's getting dark. What are we going to do for the night?"

Killian sat next to her with a muffled oof of pain and relief to be off his feet. "Good point, love. Perhaps we should hang onto them for now. As for the night, there has to be some sort of guesthouse or coach inn around here, and I'm sure you're as hungry as I am. We've got enough for now, we don't need to kill ourselves. Let's have a look."

Having purchased dinner at a food seller's called Greggs – Emma had already marveled at the sheer prosperity of this place, shops on every corner, people buying every sort of manufactured good, shelves of cold and hot sandwiches and pasties and rolls and bottled drinks, sweets and delicacies, no necessity or luxury more than a few minutes out of reach – they set about locating accommodation, which was not as easy as it looked. As Killian had predicted, there were plenty of places to stay, but none of them were falling over themselves to accept a pair of grubby vagrants who had all their worldly possessions stuffed into a plastic bag and no valid form of identification (that apparently being something people carried with them now), their only money a wad of crumpled notes stuffed in Killian's pocket. Some were polite and told them they were full up, though Emma could see the truth in their eyes, and others flatly ordered them to sod off before they rang the police. It was full dark by now, the temperature dropping fast, and leather not being the best of insulators, they were both freezing. "Let's j-j-just," Emma managed, teeth chattering. "F-find a. . . a bridge or s-something."

"Bloody hell, no. I am not letting you sleep out in the cold. Look, there's one more just down the street, I've got an idea."

Shivering, Emma trailed after him, where he stepped into the lobby, spied the young woman behind the desk, and immediately turned the intense blue eyes and soulful, alluring smolder up to eleven, leaning in close and spinning some tragic tale about what had become of him and his wife here. They were tired and frightened and lost and besides, she was going to have a baby (Emma hastily stuck out her stomach and attempted to look pregnant and pitiful). Here, they had money, they could pay. Just a room for the night, they had been turned away everywhere else, the thieves had taken everything, they needed a place for the twenty-four hours to catch their breath. Please, if she'd be so kind? They would be forever in her debt.

The receptionist, like most red-blooded creatures of the female persuasion when it came to Killian Jones, was swiftly melted. She took their money, giving them a discount for their trouble, and handed over some sort of card that Killian took as expertly as if he knew exactly what to do with it, then spent five frustrated minutes at their room door before he finally figured out how to make it open. They stepped inside to a small but tidy space with a bed, washroom, and chest of drawers, along with something they were fairly sure was called a television. They let out matching long sighs, shut the door, drew the curtains, and more or less collapsed.

While Emma lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, Killian went to investigate the washroom and came back to excitedly report that the taps ran hot water, just like that, and they could wash and freshen up. They took turns soaking and scrubbing, Emma working the contents of the little bottles through her hair and rinsing it clean, and as she stepped out wrapped only in a towel, she couldn't help but notice Killian – himself only wearing the same – watching her intently, that expression he always got when he thought she wasn't looking, which made her stomach flutter and falter. One of tender, wondering devotion, that knowledge that as long as they were still here, together, nothing could be too terrible. Just then, as much as she feared they might be stranded here forever, out of time and out of place, she knew it could be some sort of home, eventually. If she had to. With him.

She considered, then tossed the damp rope of her hair over her shoulder and padded over to him, linking her arms around his neck and rubbing her fingers into the worn grooves left by the complicated straps that held the leather harness and brace for his hook. The entire apparatus was off now, lying on the bed, and he seemed to be trying not to touch her with the stump of his left arm, in case it alarmed or repulsed her. But she reached down, caressing the rough nub of scar tissue, pulling it to the small of her back with his good hand, her breath hitching as he ran it up the knobs of her spine. She wriggled, pressing her hips into his through the thin cloth of the towels, nibbling at his earlobe and hearing him make that noise of groaning need she enjoyed so much. Her free hand toyed at the ruff of water-black hair at the nape of his neck, encouraging his mouth down to hers for a long, slow kiss, steam rising from their wet, warm bodies. Their shoulders slumped in unison as some of the fear and cold and stress and danger ebbed away for a precious moment, heads turning to deepen the kiss, mouths opening and yielding, melting. She let out a long breath, shaking, as his arms slid down to hold her firm around the waist. "That's it, love," he murmured. "That's right. I'm here."

Emma pulled fractionally away from the kiss, enough to rest their foreheads together, noses nudging. She stroked around the point of his ear, delicate as an elf's, as her hand moved to rest on the sleek dark fur of his chest. She lifted her lips to his again. "Come to bed, Killian."

He walked backwards with her across the floor until they tumbled onto it, shucking the towels, and curled into each other. He pulled the quilt over their entwined bodies, seeing gooseflesh prickling her pale bare flesh, then sank into the mattress with her, pulling her around to straddle him, their hands together guiding him into her. Until she arched her back and moaned, rolling them to fit, and slid down on him, chest to chest, so they were close as could be, twisting her hips to flip him over on top of her, taking him deeper. "Need you," she whispered. _"Need you."_

He said nothing, bending to pay thorough attention to her breasts, mouthing and kissing them in time to his lengthening strokes. Her heels hooked around the back of his calves, tugging, her head falling back, lips parting, raw and hungry for his. She keened, shifted, moving herself up to meet him, over and over, a deep and inexorable tide. _Safe._ It was not true, not really. Tomorrow could bring anything, they could not know. _Safe._ Only for now. Only for a moment. Just until waking.

_Safe._

The night was dark and cold outside, and yet she was here. Warm, comfortable, clean, fed, despite everything. And so very, very deeply loved.

_Safe._

Emma let out a strangled whimper, clutching hard. Didn't want to let go. Could not imagine that she ever would, the white heat cresting and breaking in her from head to toe, the sweet spasms of release – hers and then his, moments later. Had never felt more one half of a whole than now. Unimaginable. Impossible.

_Safe._

At last, they slept.

* * *

Emma was the first to stir the next morning, stretching back into the warm solidness of Killian behind her, his arm draped over her waist and his face nuzzled into her neck. For that moment before she was entirely conscious, before she remembered the gravity of the situation, she was able to take deep joy in the sensation of finally waking up alongside him, the knowledge that she would happily do it the rest of her life if she could. She wriggled back on him, enjoying as well the morning hardness of him against her arse, as he made a deep sleepy sound and his hand sprawled out low on her stomach, hitching her closer. But before she could proceed any further with a pleasurable awakening, he snorted, shifted, and sat half upright all at once, apparently as he too remembered. "Swan. . . Swan, are you. . .?"

Emma had to laugh at the sight of him, tousled dark hair falling in his eyes as he blinked like a confused owl, shirtless and ruffled. "It's all right, there's nothing more than yesterday. Yet. I just. . . it was nice. This."

His expression softened, and he pulled her close enough to kiss her temple. "Aye, it is at that. But tempting as it is to lounge in bed with you half the day, we should put it to more industrious uses. We should keep the clothes, but. . . my rings, they're real silver, and good-sized gemstones to boot. They'll be worth a pretty penny. Though this place is bloody appallingly expensive."

"What? Killian, no, I don't want you to have to – "

He put a finger to her lips, smile wry and sad. "I'm a pirate, love, I can always get more if I need to. This is more important. Besides, as I'm sure you know, jewelry are some of the most commonly enchanted items – rings of power and the like. If we can find someone who deals in antiques and collectibles, we might have a chance of you sensing one."

Emma agreed, still feeling vaguely guilty for no good reason, and they loathingly turfed themselves out of bed, washed, and dressed. They collected their bags, then went downstairs, turned in the card, and emerged into a typically gloomy London day, which had the paradoxical effect of lifting their spirits; it _was_ still London, the city both of them had lived most of their lives in or around, and there were a few things that remained familiar and sane. They had both been impressed by the breadth of the technology developed to compensate for the lack of magic, and had to admit that some things (such as the running hot water, wealth, and comparative cleanliness) made this time one to be desired. But still, comforts and conveniences could not outweigh the loss of family and home, just when Emma had started to believe that she could truly find them or hold onto them for anything more than fleeting moments. They still had to get back to their own time, to where they belonged.

They remained in the dark about the intricacies of modern businesses and where they might address themselves in hopes of finding an accidental magical hotspot, but Killian thought they should try where they knew there had been some before. He said he had done well at the Greenwich market many a time, a place Emma was also familiar with, so they made their way east along the river, to the Royal Naval College and a tall ship, the _Cutty Sark,_ on museum display. The market was just a few blocks up, just off the main drag in an eighteenth-century courtyard, and while it was nostalgic and enjoyable to browse among the tightly packed stalls, Emma could not sense magic at any of the many vintage jewelry and metalwork displays. Dismayed but not discouraged, they emerged on the far side into one of the narrow old side alleys – then stopped and stared as the same thing caught their eyes. At the end of the lane, a swinging sign advertised, _Pawnbroker & Antiquities Dealer._

Deciding that it was probably a wise choice to locate such an establishment within steps of the market, people wanting their finds apprised or popping in in hopes of scoring a treasure-hunting bargain, Emma sped up, Killian trotting at her heels. They reached the end, opened the door which jingled an off-key bell, and found themselves in a small, dim shop, a glass counter stretching on three sides and the shelves and ceiling crammed with a veritable cabinet of curiosities. But almost at once, she felt it roar up and punch through her chest like a physical force, knocking her back on her heels. Yes. There was something magic here. Something strong.

"Swan?" Alarmed, Killian reached to steady her. "Swan, love, what is it?"

Emma licked her lips, swallowed hard. "There's something here."

His expression sharpened, grew wary, as he glanced around at the products on offer. Nothing that seemed out of place for a shop of this sort, nothing that she could focus in on. It was in her ears, buzzing and distracting her, like an oil film interfering with the water. She couldn't tell where it was originating, what artifact might be the cause. Leaning forward, she grabbed the tarnished handbell off the counter and rang it.

The sound echoed oddly loud in the small space, making both of them jump. Then the curtain rustled, and the proprietor emerged from the back. A slight man with shaggy brown hair going to grey, a pinstriped suit and purple shirt, a neatly knotted black tie. A silver-headed cane that thumped deliberately on the old carpet, and a crocodile smile that split wide to see them, even as they stared back at him in dumbstruck, disbelieving horror.

"Hello, dearies," said Robert Gold, and raised a leisurely hand, slamming the blinds over the windows and the locks into the door. "You know, I was beginning to think you were _never_ coming."

* * *

"You." Emma wanted to come up with something fiercer, something sharper, something colder – anything she could stab into him like a blade, twist and twist. But she couldn't. Her tongue felt clumsy, petrified. _"You."_

"Me." Gold shrugged, with faux modesty. He did not resemble the glittering, prancing monster of their last acquaintance, some two hundred miles and two hundred years distant, but there was something even more frightening in his eyes, as if the dark magic had had centuries to take root and transmogrify him into someone – _something –_ that was human only to look at. "If you'll forgive a dismal pun, you've certainly taken your time about arriving."

"Bloody hell, crocodile." Killian moved up alongside Emma, subtly shifting her behind him. "Are you planning to make us beg you to tell us what happened? We're not going to. Have you been following us all this time? Riding our coattails? Even making sure we ended up in a place we couldn't get home?"

"Now, dearie, why would I do that? It's not my fault Miss Swan can't control her magic properly or aim for the correct destination. But I do have to admit that your multiple jumps through time and space were useful for me. And look, here we are. Reunited." Gold spread his arms. "Maybe it's kismet. Destiny. It's certainly not Maybelline."

"What?"

"Never mind. But I imagine I can guess why you've come here. You felt the magic, didn't you? And you wanted to take it, use it for yourself. Your last chance to jump back to _your_ London, and whatever slender opportunity, swiftly fading, you have to save your family – is that not so, Miss Swan? Thought it was some artifact, some wand or some such? You're wrong. It's me. The magic you felt is in me. I'm sure you recall the circumstances in which I came into possession of it. And the only way you can have it is by killing me."

Killian shifted his weight menacingly. "That's not a problem."

"See? No matter what he says, he still hasn't changed." Gold shook his head, like a favorite uncle dismayed by a profligate no-good nephew squandering the family fortune. "But I neglected to mention the catch. You can only kill me with the _arthame,_ and once you do, it will transfer the power to you. And the darkness as well, of course. All of it. So, dearie, is it worth it? Once you get back to your proper time, _even_ assuming you make it there, you won't be able to save them. You'll be a monster. You can try to fight the darkness, but the darkness will always win. You won't be able to break the curse, you'll drive your son away, you'll likely alienate even this murderous no-good pirate. Yes, you'll live forever, but with nothing and nobody beside you, an eternity of emptiness and damnation, darkness and hatred. Tell me, is that really a price you're so interested in paying?"

Emma went still. Her immediate instinct was to blaze back at him that he was lying, spinning some tale out of his arse to discourage her from trying it, but the one thing she had always known about Gold was that he never lied outright. Twist the truth, leave out important parts, manipulate and trick, yes – but why would he need to make this up, when the reality was far more devastating? Her brain whirled, barely staving off the panic she'd struggled to push aside. Maybe there _was_ other magic somewhere in Britain, but he didn't know about it. Surely he wouldn't just stand there and let her stab him with the black knife, especially considering he must have it under heavy guard. And she wasn't going to do this by his rules. Couldn't. But the doors and windows were still barred, and there was currently no way to walk out of here. Not until he got whatever godforsaken thing he wanted from them.

"Besides," Gold went on. "It's too late, anyway. I can tell you what will happen – what already _has_ happened, while we three have been gone. There was a great battle of London, where Jafar loosed all manner of creatures and devilries and dark powers, and nearly the entire underworld died fighting. The Night Market, Robin Hood, Will Scarlet, the rest of the Merry Men – even Regina. I suppose she fancied herself some sort of hero, though we know _that_ was a lie. In any event, they saved the city and ultimately defeated Jafar – confined him in a bottle, I believe – but at the cost of forever wiping out magic in the world. It destroyed the curse as well, so your parents and their sleeping compatriots crumpled to dust as if they had never been. Your son, Henry. . . I don't recall precisely what happened to him, it's been so long. I believe he fled to Norway to beg sanctuary from Queen Elsa and the rest of that lot. Never heard of again, so it's not likely he had much of a life or made it to a great age. So then. What _would_ you go back to?"

"We could change it," Emma said numbly. "If we made it in time. We could stop it. We could save their lives."

"So you could," Gold agreed. "If you killed me and took on the dark magic, you could travel home and attempt to prevent the outcome of the battle. But as I just explained, that would solve precisely nothing. You'd still lose them, through your best intentions. More than likely kill them yourself. If you trust no other word that comes out of my mouth, Miss Swan, trust me on this. This is not a burden you bear lightly. And no matter how strong you fancy yourself to be, it _will_ destroy you."

Emma looked sharply at him, hearing something that sounded not like a gloating assertion of superiority, but a grim, genuine warning that perhaps even he, as long and treacherous and terrible a career as he'd had, embracing the worst and most underhanded kinds of magic and politics alike, had found the dark power of the _arthame_ too overwhelming, slowly crushing his soul into fine powder and casting it to the wind. She wanted to respond somehow, but couldn't. At last she said tightly, "So what are you telling me to do?"

"Isn't it obvious? Stay here. You'll get used to everything soon enough, and there _are_ certain perks. You even have _him."_ Gold cut an arch eye at Killian. "The battle's long since over. Jafar's gone. If nothing else, everyone died for a reason: to stop him, and save London. They did that. Go back there, and even that will no longer be guaranteed. You've already learned that about time travel, Miss Swan. You can't change the past. And here in the present, which was your future, you will destroy everything if you do."

Emma gazed at him for a long moment. Then she said, "So answer me one question. When we first time-jumped, back in Paris, and ended up in Tudor London. . . you came with us, didn't you. Did you destroy the Invisible College's Royal Society, the scientific one, to be sure the _magical_ Royal Society would never have any rivals? To ensure you would be able to get Regina to cast the curse, destroy the fae world, and try to find your son? Neal?"

Gold flinched at the name. "Miss Swan, I don't think this is – "

She took one step forward. She didn't have a weapon, didn't have any magic, and he was the great and terrible Dark One, but he still retreated slightly at the look on her face. "Answer me."

"That is different. Yes, I may have encouraged certain. . . trends that led it to its demise, but I did not plant anything, did not send it on any paths it was not already on. I did not change everything around, throw everything off its course. I merely made sure what was likely to happen, did happen. I have you to thank for it, but – "

"So you did," Emma said. "You _did_ make sure the Royal Society of English Magicians had no rivals, that the curse would be cast, that there was no way anyone could challenge you. That _my kingdom_ was destroyed, _my parents_ and their subjects made to suffer, all because of you and what you wanted. Which leads me to my other question. You know everything that supposedly happened at this battle of London, you know who died, you know that Jafar was defeated and that all magic everywhere was wiped out, even the curse. _So how did yours survive?"_

Behind her, she could almost hear Killian tense, knew that his thoughts had followed hers along similar paths. _Not lying, but not telling the entire truth._ "Could it be," she went on, "that maybe you don't _want_ us to go back? Because as it stands now, _you_ are the only person with magic in the entire world, and that's a fairly comfortable situation to be in. If we did go back, if we did change the outcome – yes, it might mean we failed. But more importantly, it might mean _you_ were defeated, and that's the one thing you'll do anything to avoid."

Gold smiled, with teeth. She could almost see the monster in his eyes, peering out at her like a great wild cat hidden in the scrub, judging the moment of its pounce. "Is it, dearie?"

"Yes. You don't care about what happened in the past. You only care that you're still around now. And I don't think you have as much magic – or at least, not as much control of it – as you want us to think, otherwise you'd be doing something besides running a pawnshop in Greenwich." Emma swept a scathing hand at their surroundings. "Maybe you even _want_ me to kill you – or at least, take on the darkness. Remove the magic, you might be yourself again, just an ordinary man. Pass the poison to someone else. And make sure that if you weren't happy, nobody else could be."

"Is that so?" Gold leaned on the counter. "And even if that _was_ true, what would you do? You can see your choice quite clearly. Kill me, take the dark power, travel home, and try to change the outcome of the battle, but with the great likelihood of losing everything, becoming a beast just like me. Or you can accept that your family is gone, that there is nothing you can do to save them, that it's best for everyone the way it is, and go live with him over there – curious choice of life partner to be sure, but that is your affair, dearie, and _thankfully_ not mine. Start over in a new century, build a life from the ground up. Have a few more children, you likely won't even remember Henry's face."

Emma remained motionless. She wanted to come up with the third option, wanted more than anything, but she couldn't. "You're lying," she said, barely above a whisper. "There has to be another way."

"There isn't." Gold shrugged again. "That's it. Here. Let me make this simple."

With that, he flourished his hand, and in a whirl of dark purple smoke, the _arthame_ appeared on his open palm, the sharp edge of the knife glittering lethally. It gave Emma a cold grue to see it, remembering how Jafar had controlled them both with it, used its power to murder Neal before their eyes, and that was the magnitude of the magic Gold had absorbed into himself. That he was now apparently offering to her, the only way to get home. To Henry, to any chance whatsoever of saving her parents, of stopping the destruction of all magic everywhere. _All I have to do is turn into him._

She glanced sidelong at Killian, pleading silently for help, for him to tell her what to do. At any other time, he would have jumped at the opportunity to murder Gold, no matter the consequences, but now he was holding back, waiting for her choice. As before, no matter what he thought or hoped for, he would not place it before her decision.

Slowly, so slowly, Emma reached out. She thought she could hear the dagger whispering, encouraging her to take it, to drive it into Gold's heart. As if it had tired of him as a host, and wanted her, young and strong and desperate, still with something to fight for, whose dark secrets and broken pieces it could profitably exploit. Reminding her that she had promised not to fail her parents. That this was the only way home. Sacrifices for the greater good. No magic but this. The only way. Only way.

Gold had already said that he had ensured the destruction of the Royal Society's rivals, had taken down the fae world to cast the curse. All of this. For him. He had destroyed her life in every chance and in every way, whenever he had the opportunity, and felt not a scrap of remorse. Killing him now would bring everything full circle. And it didn't matter what he said, what he was. Of course he'd given into it, warped and deformed himself with centuries to have it corrode him through. Maybe she'd end up the same. Maybe she wouldn't. At the moment, she wasn't sure it mattered.

The only way.

She was not leaving Henry and her parents behind. Not even Robin, Regina, and Will, if there was any way she could have saved them, and she didn't. That wasn't who, now, at last, she wanted to be. And so, no matter what the price was to get home, she had to pay it.

The only way.

Emma's hand closed around the hilt of the dagger. She could hear her blood rushing in her ears, pounding behind her eyes. She could feel the magic humming into her bones, like a long drink of cool water after years wandering in the desert, and didn't know if she'd be strong enough to turn away now. Needed it. Needed it.

Everything seemed to be moving with unutterable slowness, as if through mud, as she lifted the blade and pulled her arm back, aiming it directly at Gold's heart. He wasn't resisting, was just waiting – it could be, as she'd thought, that this took the darkness from him but not his life – set him free, doing him a favor, or –

It didn't matter. She was going to see her son again. She was going to save him, save them all. She didn't give a damn about the cost. About the odds.

Emma drove the dagger home.


	32. Chapter 32

For the longest moment after Emma watched the blade pierce the wool of Gold's lapel, sink with a nasty sensation into his chest – but it did not feel right, like the clay of the golem rather than the flesh of a living man – time, after all its recent caprices and contortions, seemed to freeze solid. All she could see was the knife in him, her hand holding it, free from its alluring thrall just long enough to wonder in terror what on earth she had done. But if it was a choice of taking the darkness herself or sacrificing the rest of her family, there was no question. She had to be able to fight it – she wasn't him, that great devouring force that shattered everything it touched. If it meant anything that she was supposed to be the savior, to break the curse, it had to survive this. It would. She could. Killian would help her.

But as sense returned in jagged chunks, as she stared at Gold in petrifaction, as her fingers fell away from the hilt, she realized that nothing was happening. No grand transfer of power, no roar of blackness – not even, for that matter, Gold looking as if he was suffering the pain of so much as a paper cut. Instead he regarded the _arthame_ with an air of mild annoyance, then reached down and plucked it out, not even a speck of blood visible on his shirt. "Isn't that interesting, my dear? You want the power, but you don't want to kill me. And so, you can't."

"What?" Emma felt as if she was trapped on an ice floe adrift on a winter sea, one dwindling smaller and smaller. _"What did you do?"_

"Me? Nothing." Gold shrugged. "But taking control of this kind of magic isn't as easy as merely sticking a fork – or rather, an _arthame_ – in me and thinking you can be the one to selflessly shoulder the burden for the good of humanity. You have to _mean_ it. You have to want to kill me, to kill anything or anyone in the way, and let us be honest, Miss Swan. You make a good bounty hunter, but you don't have that kind of ruthlessness. So it seems you _won't_ do anything necessary to save your family, even if it means burning down the rest of the world, because you're a hero." He grinned, almost mockingly. "And heroes always do end up alone."

"What the devil. . .?" Killian spoke up at last, striding forward to take Emma's hand as she reached for him. "Back off, crocodile. We'll find another way, one that _doesn't_ involve making her into a monster. She'll never be dragged to your level, much as you try."

"As I already said. There is no other way. And maybe _she_ can't do it, but. . ." Gold's eye lit on his mortal enemy with a cruelly speculative gleam. "What about _you?"_

Killian went very still. After a moment he said coolly, "There's nothing I want less in this world than to have that demon bound to me, and there's nothing you can say to convince me to try, so save your breath. You deserve to die and always will. But I'm not going to be the one to do it in the service of your bloody demented mind games and manipulations."

"Come now, Captain. You know this is all you're good for. You don't want her to be made into a monster, but we both know you already _are_ one. So take the darkness, send her back, and let her have a future with her family – after she's humanely put you out of your misery, of course. Everyone wins, that way. You get to kill me at last, you die and are presumably reunited with your soiled lover and idiot brother, and you ensure the posterity of a family, after breaking one apart." Gold's face was alive with ugly, transcendent light. "If you squint, it's even a sort of twisted heroism. You didn't truly think you had a _future_ with her, did you? She's keeping you close for now because it's her only way home, but the instant you returned, she'd push you away. There was no happily-ever-after for you. You're replaceable. Expendable. You always have been. Don't you want to do something that _matters?"_

"Killian." Emma reached for him in sudden fear, pulling him around to look at her, breaking the unblinking stare between him and Gold. "Don't listen to him. A few minutes ago he was telling us to forget killing him and to go off and start a life somewhere. You can't trust a single word that comes out of his mouth. He lies, you know that. He always lies."

"Do I?" Gold's crocodile smile widened. "Why, then. Prove me wrong. Tell him that you love him, that you trust him never to leave you, that you know he'll never be tempted to fall back to the dark side. That you haven't only let him in because you have no choice, and it's not just about your survival. Go on." He crossed his arms. "I'm waiting."

Emma flinched this time as if she was the one to be stabbed. "Gold – what the hell is your _problem?_ Isn't it enough? You're the one who needs to prove he can do anything besides ruin countless millions of people's lives for _centuries,_ in England or in Misthaven or across the entire world. Just because we don't want to unleash the same darkness – the same _monstrosity –_ "

"See?" Gold glanced at Killian, with an air of vindicated triumph. "She can't say it. Won't say it. Take that as you will. And you, Miss Swan – think fast."

Emma spun around to face him again, having a terrible feeling she'd made a fatal mistake in taking her eyes off him – as the pawnbroker moved in a flashing blur, jerked his hand back, and slammed the _arthame_ into Killian's chest, so savagely that the blade exploded out the back of his shoulder. The wound began to smoke and hiss as Killian's mouth opened and closed in shock, and Gold wrenched the black knife out. Killian reached up in confusion to press his good hand over it, but blood was already everywhere. He took a step, swaying, then stumbled, went to his knees, and collapsed.

" _NO!"_ Emma barely recognized the voice that screamed, didn't know if it could be hers, as she crawled across the floor to catch his head and cradle it against her chest, fingers straining and burning for their vanished magic, as she could feel nothing but incinerating panic. He was struggling to look at her, trying to shape words around the blood in his mouth – she couldn't be sure, but she thought it was _No. No, don't. Don't. Let me go._

She didn't hear, didn't see. An engulfing, unholy rage had filled her, a desperation beyond words or thought or rationality, that she was not, _was not,_ going to let this man die on her. She raised a clenched fist, and somehow the _arthame_ was in her hand, twisting and trailing long, elegant streamers of dark magic. _Burning down the rest of the world._ The spark was lit, and it would be simplicity itself, the simplest thing, to fan it to inferno. She hadn't been able to summon it for the abstract idea of her family, much as she wanted them – she still had never known them, really felt them, had a moment where she actually believed they could belong to her. But with Killian – constantly at her side, loving and supporting her through space and time, from last night in the hotel to waking up this morning in his arms – there was no abstraction, no safe remove, nothing that was off limits or that could be held more dearly than his life. _Burn. Burn. Burn._

Her hands were doing something without her volition. Emma jerked the blade of the black knife, teeth bared, as a swirling maelstrom whipped up around Gold's body, pouring from every orifice, his arms flung wide like a horrific scarecrow, as the dark magic seethed and churned and snarled out of him and hit the knife Emma was holding. She felt it to the hilt, deep as if it was twisted into her heart, something cold and foul and noxious, sentient and eager, crawling into her veins like tar. It took every drop of her willpower to force it downward, into Killian, as his mouth opened in a silent scream and his blue eyes went black, as she lost sight of his face in the chaos, of anything but the void. The darkness was still swarming over her as well, seeping into her pores, putting down roots like a poisonous weed in her heart, until she was swimming dizzily on the very brink of the abyss. It was too much, and yet it kept coming, pouring into them both, flooding them out, drowning them. _Stop,_ she wanted to scream, but she had no voice, and to stop was to damn Killian, to lose, to fail, to break.

She could not stop.

She could only burn.

* * *

Emma had no idea how much time had passed when she finally became slowly, painfully aware of herself again. She was lying crumpled on the floor of the pawn shop, sprawled and shattered, her hands feeling like useless lumps as they struggled to push the world back into its proper dimensions. There was a dull ringing in the back of her head, as if an out-of-tune bell had been struck and held, and she shook it feebly, which only succeeded in making it hurt more. There was a faintly familiar tingle in her fingers, a renewed presence of magic, and she raised them frantically and sent off an exploratory cascade of sparks. Yes, she had power again, she could find and open a portal – she could get home, they could –

Something was wrong. She felt it as soon as she used it. It wasn't her old magic – it was much stronger, deeper, darker. It felt like a wave crashing through her, knocking her off balance and into the break, as she curled her aching legs under her and staggered to her feet. Almost ran across the floor to the full-length mirror behind the counter, and stared.

It was her – but it wasn't. Her hair had gone white, twisted and pinned up in a severe braided crown, her face just as pale, lips like a red wound, and she was wearing some sort of ensemble in black leather and scale, tight-fitting to the point of indecency, brusque and dark and dangerous – sharp-heeled boots, belted jacket and sleek trousers. She raised a hand to touch her face in disbelief, as if convinced the mirror must be lying to her, that this thing – this Black Swan in truth – could not be her, that it was some sort of complicated illusion. But it was her. She had taken on the darkness. Fallen.

Emma stood for a moment longer, before she wheeled around as a second horrifying realization struck her. _"Killian?"_ Where was he? Where was Gold? There was no sign of either of them – or of the _arthame._ Had it even worked, or had she destroyed Killian herself, with the best of intentions? Had he already opened a portal to their time, and gone without her?

Forcing down panic that tasted sour at the back of her throat, Emma lurched across the floor, pushed the door open with a jangle, and stumbled out into an ordinary Greenwich afternoon. She attracted a few strange glances with her outlandish getup, but aside from some people crossing the street to avoid walking past her, nobody seemed flocking to call the authorities. She could hear the alien magic inside her whispering to her, telling her to just use it, to make it easier for himself – to throw out a tracking spell and drag Killian back to her, wherever he was, and had to fight it down. She had to keep it dormant, until she could find a way to destroy it. But not just yet. She needed it right now. Needed to save Killian, and get home.

She combed up and down the Greenwich quays, the streets and alleys and shops and boutiques and pubs, through the boatloads of arriving sightseers, even as a small voice in the back of her head told her she was blindingly foolish to think he had stayed here, now armed with half of all the dread dark magic in the world. But she was convinced that she would just _know_ it if he was gone, and that was not her impression; the darkness in her could feel the rest of itself nearby, but hidden. She already felt raw and fractured without him, increasingly frantic and unfocused. She couldn't keep it at bay by herself much longer either.

At last, tiring of the staring and pointing (and mothers pulling their children close when she passed), Emma performed a quick glamour spell to return her appearance to normal, at least to outward eyes. This was ridiculous. If she tried to scour London without magic, it would take her years, and she couldn't presume he would be as careful at not using this new power as she was trying to be. And if using one wretched solitary tracking spell meant her doom, she had been done for anyway, and none of this would make any difference.

So she concentrated, focusing on the darkness; it was in them both, all she had to do was follow it. It briefly and horrifyingly occurred to her to fear that perhaps it had _not_ worked, that she had killed him and the darkness was running amok without any vessel or tether, but she shoved it aside. She could feel something, a spark, just up the hill, through the park, in the Royal Observatory. Not far. He was here.

Emma looked at the distant silhouette of the observatory on the hilltop, the length and steepness of the grade that separated them, and once more decided that doing this the old-fashioned way was for chumps. She stepped into an alley, made a brief gesture, and dematerialized in a swirl of smoke, only to reappear and step out a moment later on the treed walkway that led to the entrance. It was past dusk, but there were still a few tourists milling around and taking pictures of the view down to the Naval College and the Thames, so – feeling pricks of guilt, but overridden by her need to get to Killian – she performed just enough of a suggestion spell to get them to clear out. Then when she was sure she had the place to herself, she broke into a sprint, hurtling up to the dark bulk of the observatory. Undid the ward on the door, stepped through, and climbed the narrow spiral staircase into the onion dome, up to the housing of the great telescope that sat on the Prime Meridian, which had existed in their time and been known as the secretive haunt of some of the Royal Society's most closely guarded experiments into the nature of magic, into the very stuff of the stars, the fabric of the universe. In this future without magic, its role was doubtless different, but perhaps not as much.

She saw him before he saw her. He was a dark, brooding shadow, leather jacket flaring around him; evidently he had also taken advantage of their new power to effect a few improvements to his wardrobe. There was just enough lambent light reflecting from the great lens to catch on the lethal curve of his hook and from his rings, his good hand resting with studied casualness on the barrel of the telescope. Shut up here like an angel with a demon's face (or a demon with an angel's face), gazing down on the little people going about their little lives, cool and pitiless. She saw no sign of Gold, couldn't decide if that was for the better or worse – almost couldn't stand to do this at all, but had to. Her voice was soft, but it carried like a shout in the polished acoustics of the dome. "Killian."

He started, half-turned, the glow falling on his face and dividing him starkly in half – one side in shadow, the other side faintly illumined with golden glow. His eyes were bluer than ever, but she could see the demon lurking just beneath. "Swan."

She had to repress a shudder. There was none of the warmth, the tenderness, the teasing that normally underlaid his words when he was speaking to her, the constant strength and support, and she could not appreciate just how much she had counted on – more than that, expected and anticipated it as merely the order of things – until it had so completely vanished. Surely he'd understand, surely he had to see that this was the only thing she could have done to keep them together, to save his life after Gold's unfathomable act of evil. She took a step. "Killian, I – "

He whirled, a short, sharp movement, and raised his hand. Chains sprang into existence across the stairway, blocking her from climbing up to him. He had to know it was no real deterrence, that she could simply vanish them away in turn if she chose, but the visual impact of it, of him throwing a barrier in her face and ordering her back, was enough. "That's close enough, love."

"Killian, please." Emma stayed where she was, fearful of setting him off into any more elaborate displays of magic. At least she had gotten used to using her own before it went dark, but this was a power he had never before experienced, and she had a feeling it could go to his head far more quickly than to hers. "We – we can fix this. We can fight it. Both of us, together. We have magic now, we can get home, we can stop everything from happening. The battle of London, the destruction of the underworld. . . everything that he said. Be. . . be heroes."

He looked as if she'd gutted him. "Heroes?" His lip twisted, curling into a truly terrifying sneer. "You think that's what will come of this? When you've turned both of us into bloody demons, when you heard me say I'd rather die? And then, what he said. . . that you were only keeping me close because you had no other choice but to rely on me to get back to our time. . . that I was a fool to think we had any kind of a future together, that I'm bloody _expendable. . ."_

"No." Beneath its glossy carapace of black leather armor, Emma's heart was hammering as if it was about to give out. "No, he's lying. You know that. He always lies, he tricks, he – "

"Is he?" Killian's eyes met hers, with a sensation that knocked her back on her heels like a punch, as the expression on his face became ever more manic and mirthless. "We both know he doesn't lie, not outright. He uses the truth as a weapon, to twist and force people to face what hurts most. He asked you to admit it, to admit any of it – that you cared for me, that you wanted me for any other reason than survival, that you had no choice in letting me in, that you wouldn't push me away when we returned. And you couldn't. You couldn't deny a single word of it. So I ask you." He raised his fist, and the massive telescope began to creak around on its pivot, aiming its opaque, glassy-eyed stare at Emma as if down the barrel of a cannon. _"Who's the one lying here?"_

Emma's brain had locked up. She could only stare at him, speechless. All the words that might have redeemed her, might have reached him, were floating uselessly in the ether, unmanifest, unformed. She could see the eerie glow of dark magic crackling around his fingers, knew that in a moment more he might lose whatever slender thread of self-control he was hanging onto, whatever wisp of his old self was fighting back against the inexorable tide. Yet somehow, at the greatest extremity of her need, something unlocked inside her, and it all came spilling out. "Killian, I – I couldn't say it because I was afraid. I was afraid that saying anything – that changing it – that _telling_ the world that I couldn't – that I couldn't do this without you. . . that it would take it away from me. When we've been through time and space, to Misthaven and back, to this future, everywhere. . . you were it. You were always there. And I couldn't go back and save my family – I couldn't live a single day back in our time, no matter what, if you weren't there. When Gold stabbed you. . . there was only one way, and I. . . I had to. I couldn't take on the magic with the thought of my family in the abstract, no matter how much I wanted – want – to save them. But when it was you there, really in danger, right in front of my eyes, I. . ."

She trailed off, hideously afraid to look him in the face, to see if this was having any effect whatsoever. But he was still standing like a statue, and so she plunged on. "I broke. I couldn't stand it. I didn't think about anything but saving you. Because I. . ." It burned in her throat, begging her not to say it, to protect herself, but she knew that if she drove him away one more time, she would lose him forever. "Because I love you."

Silence. Utter, complete, crackling silence, reigning as if in the wake of a lightning strike, as she almost looked away again but instead forced herself to stand her ground. He stood motionless, indeed so still that she fancied she could see the air moving around him, but this was utterly misleading as to the magnitude of the battle raging inside him. She had already felt the exhaustion of the impossible strength it took to fight back, to quell the demon in her head, and she knew she didn't have the same depths of rage and darkness that he did, the same weight of terror to force back, no matter how hard her life had been. She held her tongue as long as she could, until it became unbearable. "Killian. . . please."

He lifted his head slowly, like a broken automaton. After one more harrowing moment, he smiled. "Of course," he said. "You did it all for love. I understand."

There was still something strange and standoffish in his tone, but he made a quick gesture, dropping the chains with a clatter, and she ran up the steps and threw herself into his arms, mouth hungrily seeking his. He gave it to her, their lips browsing and tasting and musing, creating a fair simulacrum of the solace they had found in each other throughout this entire demented adventure, and for that small span of time she breathed again, fingers tangled in his hair, their foreheads pressed together. "So," she whispered. "Let's make a portal and go home."

"Aye. Let's." Stepping away from her, he directed another brisk motion at the telescope, which swung back around to face them. Emma winced at the noise, and had a sudden fear of some unsuspecting park warden coming to investigate the noise and running into not just one but _two_ dread sorcerers hell-bent on a more-than-mortal quest. She saw a pinprick of light at the center of the lens, moving like oil on water, until it spread out and transformed into a solid, gleaming sheet, a mirror reflection – or a vision to the other side. Remembering the (to say the least) trouble they had encountered after mistaking this London for theirs, she wasn't sure whether to trust this was the right one, but it certainly did look like it. For a moment, she felt a pang of regret at having to leave this future – as much of an unwelcome diversion as it had been, there was no denying its interest and indeed improvement in several areas. But no matter the attractions of running hot water and convenient food and transport, to name a few, her heart was elsewhere.

She glanced sidelong at Killian, conducting the portal wider and wider until the entire lens began to glow with violent heat, until the telescope was no longer reflecting it but projecting it into a swiftly widening opening in the floor, and a sudden cold finger of unease touched the back of her neck. "Killian, we're going. . . going back to stop the battle, aren't we? Make sure Jafar's still defeated, then get back to Yorkshire and try to break the – "

"Maybe you are, Swan." He turned to face her with a mocking white smile. "As for me. . . I'm going to skin myself a bloody crocodile."

And with that, he took a running start, launching himself past her in a flare of crimson-colored smoke, as he hit the portal and vanished down it like a rock into a pool, with barely a splash. It happened so swiftly that Emma had no time to process it, to do anything except stare in shock, as she struggled with the horrified realization that she had not in fact saved him – had instead pushed him deeper into the darkness. No matter what had happened to Gold here (and she was still unsure) if Killian tracked him down in their own time and killed him, he could still have what had become an even more richly merited vengeance. No matter if it tilted off what was supposed to happen in this future, if it somehow ended up destroying them and made it retroactively impossible for them to run into him here, to use the magic to get home. Not to mention that if Killian cut down Gold in cold blood, no matter how deserved, it would be impossible to ever ransom his soul back from the darkness. She would lose him, but not simply to death, the way she had lost so many others. She would have to watch him rampage for years, perhaps have to be the one to stop him herself, to destroy any chance or hope she had of ever moving on. Because, she knew, she couldn't. Not now. Not from him.

Choking back tears, scratching and clawing to drown out the whispers in her own head, Emma took a moment to shake, and shake, and shake. To crack – but not to break. The portal was starting to close, and she flared out a gust of magic to keep it open, unable to deny that she too was seduced and swayed by the taste of the dark power, that it felt different and better and stronger than anything she had ever experienced before. She'd give it up, she would. But now she had to keep it more than anything. Had to put this right. If it wasn't already far too late.

Emma remained where she was for a bare instant longer. Then she started to run, and, for what she prayed with all her might was the last time, threw herself adrift into the maw, and tumbled into nothing.

* * *

Will Scarlet was stationed up the Royal Observatory tower, where he had been sent by Robin in order to report on any signs of Jafar's imminently expected assault, when most unexpectedly, the roof did something funny, split apart, and a pair of nutters fell out of the heavens directly onto his head. Even more vexingly, they didn't have the consideration to do it together. He had just been flattened by the first nutter, who sounded oddly familiar when he grunted, and was vainly trying to recapture his wind when the second nutter dropped onto the pile and rendered that an entirely futile exercise. Thus followed multiple undignified moments of the three of them scrambling around, getting all up close and personal with any number of embarrassing bits, until he abruptly came face to face with the second one, and felt shock lance through him to his toes. "What the – it's _you?!"_

Emma Swan – at least, he was fairly sure it was her, didn't have a clue what she thought she was doing with the new evil look – stared back at him, just as shocked. _"Will?"_

"Well, it ain't the bloody Queen," Will said tersely, though in truth he was nearly as stunned as if dear old Vicky herself had just bombed onto his head in crinoline and state crown. After Miss Swan and the captain had gone to Paris and never been heard from again, he had been convinced that something terrible had happened, that they had walked directly into whatever trap Jafar had set, and there was no chance of them being seen again in this life. It had broken his heart a good deal more than he liked to admit, but he had refused to let himself dwell on it, not when there was so much else still at stake. Perhaps that was a good thing, seeing as they'd just been spit up like a pair of cherry pits, but he had lived in close proximity to Killian Jones long enough to sense when something was wrong, and said sense was currently going off like Smee after he'd had the bean stew. As the captain disentangled himself with haughty dignity and got to his feet, Will took a longer look at him and frowned. "The bloody hell happen to you?"

Instead of answering, Hook jerked two fingers disdainfully, and Will was flicked aside by a giant invisible fist as negligently as if he was a buzzing fly, slamming into the wall and sliding down it. The shock of it took him aback more than the pain, even as whatever little breath he had succeeded in recapturing was knocked clean out of him once more. He was quite sure that if the captain had had magic – _dark_ magic to boot, Will had lived in and around the underworld long enough to be quite sure that this wasn't any pleasant parlor-trick harmless showpiece – he certainly would not have waited this long to use it. Furthermore, he would have done so on far more formidable foes than just one young thief, and for far darker purposes. Indeed Will briefly wondered if this _was_ the captain, or instead someone, some _thing,_ masquerading as him for reasons unknown. "Oy," he croaked, as authoritatively as he could. "Don't know who you are, but you'd better stop pretendin' to be the captain before he shows up and kicks your – "

"Still as dull as ever, Scarlet." Those blue eyes stared at him as if from a long, icy tunnel. "It _is_ me. And I have something to attend to, so I don't advise trying to stop me. _Either_ of you." He threw a withering look at Emma, who was staring at him in raw appeal. "Enjoy the battle, eh?"

With that, he vanished in a puff of red smoke, as both Will and Emma remained entirely at a loss for words. Then Will wheeled on her and demanded, _"The_ _bloody hell happened to him?"_

"I. . . it's my fault." She glanced away, unable to meet his eyes. "It was that or let him die, after Gold. . . after he. . ."

"Gold? What did that miserable wanker d – you know what, never mind." Will decided that if he got suckered into asking questions now, he'd never stop, and then they very well might miss the battle and anything else important going on with it. "Robin's got the entire underworld at arms, we're expecting an attack from Jafar any minute, but we don't know where or when or how. Your boy's back in Norway, he wanted to come and fight but I knew you'd have all of our hides if we ever saw you again. Princess Anna and that weird bloke who shags reindeer promised they'd take him to safety. Elsa's tryin'. . . tryin' to get that ice wall down, before it's too late." He swallowed hard, remembering his own farewell with the queen and how it was no guarantee either of them, or any of them, would see each other again. "Said if she did, she'd send all the freed steamships and airships here, hope they were in time to do some good. So. That's that."

Emma had clearly heard perhaps only half of what he said, too lost in her own grief and guilt, but she surfaced long enough to give him a wan smile – then most unexpectedly, lean in and peck his cheek with the briefest and lightest of kisses. "Thank you, Will. It's. . . it's good to see you."

As she started for the stairs, leaving him abashed and blinking, he had to fight the overwhelming urge to shout after her, to demand to know what he was supposed to do, where they had been, if there was any hope of reversing whatever terrible thing had happened to the captain – call him a fool, but he just didn't think that was who Killian Bartholomew Jones, regardless of what the bugger said, actually was. Not when he had Emma, not when he'd clawed free of the grip of vengeance inch by terrible inch. If Gold was involved, it could only be brutal and unfair and terrible, and just then, Will Scarlet discovered that he was bloody tired of the Royal Society, whether whole or in part, taking away things and people he cared for. He'd done a stint as a bloody clay statue at least partially thanks to them, and after so long running, it was about time they took a stand, they _all_ took a bloody stand. Against Jafar, sure – but against everything else as well. Against all the deprivation and misery the Royal Society had wrought in London over the decades, and would doubtless return straight to doing if they somehow came through this with heads and arses (or just arses) intact. No. No more. He might just be a bloody lowborn scum-of-the-streets thief, but it had to start somewhere. _No more._

"Oy," Will said. "Swan."

She stopped short, clearly not pleased at being diverted. "Yes?" she snapped.

"I'm comin' with you." He jogged to catch up. "You don't need to tell me where ya been or what ya done, but you can't go alone."

"Yes, I can." Her shoulders crunched inward, under the weight of a massive, impossible burden. "I did this. I have to be the one to fix it."

"Savin' your pardons," Will said frankly, "but that's a giant load of horseshit. You go alone, I don't care what kind of magic you think you have, you're walkin' exactly into the trap they're all setting for you. I may be useless compared to you, but if nothing else, I can take a good few shots and buy you time for whatever you can pull out of the hat to actually save us. Well, fine. I've always been cannon fodder for whatever bloody reason or other. Let me do it for a good reason. If this _is_ quits, then. . ." He hesitated. "Don't want to go out like a ninny."

Emma blinked, clearly caught off guard and unable to formulate an instant denial, much as she wanted to. "Will, I can't ask – "

"No, you can't. So I'm offering." He shrugged. "Spent my life livin' as a. . . well, not much. Leastways I have a choice about how I want to face the end. And I may not know exactly what you feel, but the captain – but _Killian_ – he's someone I'd lay a good bit on the line for. God knows why. He's a bastard. But he's _our_ bastard, a good bloody man for all he tries to pretend otherwise, one who might actually be a hero and the only way we're survivin' this, and whatever Robert bloody Gold did tryin' to make him forget, I'm not letting him get away with it one more godforsaken time. Long n' short of it, really. Let's go."

* * *

Killian Jones found the sorcerer where he thought he would: on the promenade of Saint Paul's Cathedral by the twin bell towers, wind whipping his robes and hair impressively, as the dark clouds thickened to a gathering storm in the dusk-lit sky. He strode forward with no attempt to conceal his presence, until Jafar suddenly turned, teeth flashing in a lupine smile. "Captain! After all this time. I was beginning to think you weren't coming."

"After all this _time?"_ Killian's lips peeled back over his teeth. "I suppose one could say that. And I've not returned empty-handed. Now we can finally bloody accomplish what you hired me to do, all that time ago at the beginning of this fool mess and nonsense. Destroy the crocodile, and everything he's touched."

"Good form." Jafar surveyed him appraisingly. "Though this change of heart. . . can it be counted on?"

"Aye." Killian spun on the spot, pointed, and lit the bell tower in scarlet flames, crumbling the cupola in a groan of collapsing stone. The look of genuine surprise – and perhaps, a faint hint of fear – on Jafar's face was enough to make him wish he'd taken out the entire dome, but there would be time for that later. "And don't think we're meeting on the same terms as before, when you had everything I wanted and I had to beg and scrape for it. Call this more. . . a meeting of equals. A strategic alliance between partners."

"Indeed." If Jafar _was_ rattled, he disguised it quickly, and flashed his usual urbane smile once again. "A profitable acquisition to be sure, my dear fellow. I am sure it will be of greatest interest in our future dealings."

"Aye," Killian said again, more shortly. He felt barely on the brink of control, spiraling deeper and deeper into the maelstrom without a bottom, and he wanted this done. "Well, get on with it, then. Aren't we attacking London? Destroying the Royal Society root and branch?"

"Patience." Jafar sighed. "Don't you remember what I explained? _Gold_ is going to destroy London, and we are going to be heroically spotted stopping him. It goes back to choice. It always does. Surely you must know that. And the people will never fully and finally embrace me until they have seen me deliver them from their oppressors. You and your friends have alternately assisted me and thwarted me, but none of you have realized that _I_ am the hero of this entire story. I am the cleverest, the strongest, the wittiest – the best looking, if I may say so – and by _far_ the most interesting and dynamic and unpredictable. And now, I am going to bring down the tyrant, the central and overriding villain of this tale. Both of us. We're heroes." Jafar smiled thinly. "And if the world won't recognize that, it will burn."

Killian went very still, hearing again what Gold had said, trying to goad him into killing him, what would result if he took the darkness. _If you squint, it's even a sort of twisted heroism._ Perhaps it was so. It seemed cold that way, clear, logical. An excuse and a reason. _Not my fault._ He had never asked to take the darkness; had been perfectly willing to die rather than live with it, but it had been forced into him anyway. So perhaps whatever he did with it was justified, nothing to concern him, finally free of the endless decades of guilt and misery that had sabotaged him before. It would be so easy. So very, very easy.

"How do you know," he said coolly, "that Gold's coming?"

Jafar grinned. "Because, Captain, it's quite simple. You've brought him here."

Killian was taken aback, as he didn't recall doing any such thing – at least consciously. Gold had been gone when he awoke in the pawnshop after his transformation, which seemed to prove maddeningly that the bugger still wasn't dead, and hence a great part of his eagerness to return to their proper time was to finally get his hands on him once and for all. But it was true that if he was anywhere (or any _when)_ nearby, Gold would be drawn to London tonight, and the presence of his greatest foes together – Jafar and Killian – like a blazing Yuletide log. For a moment something bit at the edges of his brain, thinking he could catch a glimpse of a larger plan. Gold still had the _arthame,_ the black dagger, the one thing that could kill the creature he was now. . . _Robert Gold the hero. . ._

But before he could get his head around it, they heard the promenade door creak, opening from the staircase that led up the inside of the dome. A spill of gaslight fell before the measured steps of the advancing figure, _arthame_ held out before him, as Killian felt a horrible jerk on his insides. "So long," Gold said. "I've waited so long to have the both of you in one place, openly confessing your treason. This _was_ a bit of a runabout way to accomplish it, but all the more satisfying for it. Now, Captain, I destroy you once and for all and take back my power, which will showcase the might of the Royal Society and its rightness to protect Britain and the world. This stray dog here. . . he just needs to be put down, I'm afraid. No martyr's death for you. It's been too long. It ends tonight."

"Indeed." Jafar rolled up his sleeves, pinning them in place with his cufflinks. "Shall I shoot first, or you? They'll be arguing about it for years if we don't decide, you know."

Killian laughed, raw and wild in his throat, then froze as Gold whipped the _arthame_ around and pointed it at him, stringing him up like a puppet, completely out of control of himself, feet dangling grotesquely. Gold directed him to the brink of the wall, holding him over the dark streets of London below – the wind screamed through Killian's hair as the President of the Royal Society turned him nearly upside down, suspended in midair. "Don't distract me," Gold said pleasantly. "Even for an immortal, that fall would hurt. Or – " he flicked the dagger again, and Killian was wheeled the right way up, dropped on the stones with a clatter – "no, I know. You're going to fight to protect me. Attack him."

Killian could feel blood vessels bursting in his eyes with the force of his attempted resistance, but it was no good. He was jerked to his feet, and his hand flared out, aiming a deadly beam of red light at Jafar – who caught it and blocked it even faster, returning a counterattack that Killian parried without conscious thought. They traded a lightning-quick series of volleys, smoking and sparking, exploding holes into Sir Christopher Wren's great cathedral, as Jafar dematerialized to one side of the dome and Killian followed him, their assaults braiding together in a halo of light and color and unearthly thunder, so they could hear the pipes of the organ booming in the choir below, a deep and dolorous symphony of magic and magnificence. Faster, faster, _faster._ Now they were down in the darkened nave itself, candles flaring to life and then out again as blazes of aether burned overhead, the sacraments clattering from the altar to the floor, chairs and pews and prayerbooks overturned, clash and parry, almost entirely equally matched –

Until, just a hairsbreadth too late, Jafar missed his counterstroke, and Killian's attack took him completely off his feet, throwing him back into the high windows of the apse. Jafar slid bonelessly down it, leaving a great streak of blood, and as Killian stood above him, fist and hook smoking, gasping for breath, drunk and sickened and barely aware of what he had just been forced to do, he heard an approving giggle behind him. "Good work, dearie," Robert Gold said. "Time to finish it."

Killian turned around slowly, dumbly, as Gold held up the bronze bottle – the third one, the one that had thrown them out into the wilds of their time-traveling adventure. The one Jafar had wanted all along. "We're going to pop him," Gold went on, "in this. That way he'll be safely contained, unable to hurt anyone again, but his magic available to me when I need it. Forever under my thumb, reminded of his status as a servant, the one thing that chafed him the most of all. Perform the spell. There are doubtless other monsters afoot I have to stop as well."

Killian looked down at his trembling hand, the soot-stained rings, the shining curve of his hook. He had been ordered; Gold held the _arthame,_ the _arthame_ controlled him, he had no choice. Then he would have to stand like a dumb animal for the slaughter as Gold killed him and took the power back, disposed of him like a dirty rag, victorious now and forever –

No – no, he couldn't – not what he wanted, not what he meant – hadn't intended this – had a hazy memory of Emma, of Emma and the telescope in the Observatory dome, of saying something – words that could not fight through to him now, as his spine almost snapped as he struggled –

"Perform the spell." Gold's voice had gotten sleeker and infinitely more dangerous. "I'm not asking a third time."

Slowly, unable to resist the crushing weight of command, Killian revolved back. His hand lifted, power flared, and engulfed Jafar's unconscious body in a glow of cherry-red magic, dissolving him into a puff of smoke. The smoke itself was sucked into the bronze bottle, which Gold triumphantly capped shut as burning glyphs appeared on the side and chained around the neck. _Gone._ Jafar was gone. Defeated. Exactly as Gold had promised had happened in the battle the first time, at their meeting in the Greenwich pawnshop two hundred years from now. _In any event, they saved the city and ultimately defeated Jafar – confined him in a bottle, I believe – but at the cost of forever wiping out magic in the world._ Which meant he was next – which meant that all of this was the entirety of Gold's masterful, long-con manipulation, that this had all played into his hands and this was the end of everyth –

" _KILLIAN!"_

Both of their heads jerked up as the high doors were blown off their hinges, and they stared in shock as Emma Swan – with, of all the _bloody_ people – Will Scarlet hot on her heels came sprinting in, footfalls echoing madly in the half-destroyed nave. Her face was alight with a maddened, steely fervor as Gold jerked up the _arthame,_ clearly warning her against coming any closer, but her hand flashed up, ripped it loose with a blaze of magic, and sent it spinning across the marble floor. Both Gold and Will dived for it, but Will got there first. He grabbed the black knife with one hand, cocked back, and punched the President of the Royal Society of English Magicians full in the nose with the other. This apparently felt so good that he did it again, as Gold reeled back, blood streaming down his face. "You insolent little _verm –_ "

"Aye," Will panted. "That's me. Little vermin. So if I just popped you in the ugly snout, what's it make _you?"_

Killian could only stare. His head swiveled back and forth between the disheveled Gold, Will clutching his dagger, and Emma approaching him as if toward a wild beast, hand out and hackles high. "Killian," she whispered. "Killian, listen to me. I know you're still in there. I know you can fight this. Please. Please, listen to me. I love you. _I love you."_

He remained motionless, strung too tightly to hold, saddened and sickened and infuriated in equal measure. At him, at what he'd done – at losing sight of himself so utterly, of being turned into Gold's flunkey, of everything. Memories flashed through his head like falling stars: seeing Liam crumple into his arms and breathe his last, of seeing Milah do the same, of seeing Bae throwing his offer in his face, of loving and loving and loving until the world crushed it to fine powder, of wondering why he bothered and yet being so deeply and desperately unable to stop. And now, presented with one last obstacle, the greatest and most terrible, in the person of Emma Swan. Destroy her too, and nothing would ever touch him again. He would be safe.

He raised his hand drunkenly, trying to summon up the power. It only spat a few times, a shower of feeble red sparks, and went out. His eyes remained locked on hers, neither of them turning away, as tears poured down her cheeks but she made no sound. Her lips formed around the shape of his name.

And in it, somewhere, he felt himself snap.

He whirled around, raised a hand, and felt the dagger break free of Will's grasp and fly to his, as he reached out with his hook and snagged hold of Emma's jacket with the other. Before she had time to protest, he sent them up in a whirl of smoke, far and fast through space, up and up and up – until a moment later, they tumbled out on the wet grass, beneath the yew trees, in front of the door that led into Lady Regina Mills' enchanted vault, on the lawn of Applewood Hall in Yorkshire. Until he knew, _he knew_ beyond all challenging or questioning, what to do.

"Stab me," he whispered hoarsely, and handed her the _arthame._ "Emma, love. Stab me. It'll destroy the darkness. It'll break the curse. It'll give you back your family. It will save you. _Please."_

She stared back at him, then at the knife in her hand. Her expression was nothing but blank terror. "What? No! _No!"_

"Please!" He grasped her by the shoulders, making her meet his eyes. "I can't stand to live this way – I can't be Gold's murderous, mindless toy! I can't do this again – I can't return to that. To him. There's no time. He'll follow us, he'll find us. You have to. Now! Please!"

Tears were streaming down her face. She pointed the tip of the black dagger at his chest, then lost her nerve, and threw herself without a word into his arms, their mouths finding each other for one final, frantic kiss, as she was sobbing so hard he could feel her shaking within him, some hollow, terrible echo of the act of love, as they had entwined in so many other places and times to give themselves to each other in joy. He wanted for it to never end, never never never, but it was the only way. "Stab me," he begged her. "Emma! _Now!"_

For one final, terrible instant she could not. Then she swung her arm back, and drove the blade hilt-deep into his heart.

Killian jerked, convulsing. Could feel coldness burning outward from the place where it tore into him, could see a blast of whiteness enshrouding them, could see the darkness fleeing from her. His fading eyes were full of her, her impossible beauty. _Angel. An angel._ Yet he was destined for no hero's repast, no peaceful surcease. No heaven and no light. Nothing.

He had read somewhere that hearing was the last sense to go, when a man died. It seemed to be true; his world was collapsing into darkness, even as the light still burned on the underside of his eyelids, but he could still hear. Hear the crack to shake the firmament, could know that the curse was broken, that they were waking, they were all waking. That it was over. That morning would come. That for the first time in her life, Emma Swan would soon have her family around her. That Jafar was defeated, that she would live, _gods_ she would live and it would be beautiful.

Far away in his darkening mind, he could see a faint image of them, locked together on the bed, that night in Norway when they first came to each other. Could hear Emma laughing.

Could hear, ever more faintly, Emma sobbing fit to break her heart.

Could hear nothing.

Could not.


	33. Chapter 33

Emma woke beneath the sharp-slanted eaves of the majestic, sprawling attic bedchamber, the black velveteen curtains lashed to the posts and weak sunlight paving the bare floorboards. Her head ached, her chest was sore, and every breath felt like a hot knife under her ribs. She had the oddest sense of déjà-vu as she stared emptily at the ceiling, something that her bruised and broken brain could not manage to riddle out. Now that she was awake, she wanted nothing so much as to go back to sleep, escape from a nightmare that was far greater and more terrible than anything she had to contend with there, but it was impossible. She felt as if she was sinking, trapped in a foundering ship as it slid beneath the waves, but even there, a wreck could come to rest. Not for her. No cessation. No peace.

After a moment, she sat up unsteadily, raking her fingers across her gritty face, her tangled, uncombed hair. Now that she was awake, she supposed dully that the logical following step was to dress, but that sounded like far too much an effort, and for far too little purpose. She would be expected downstairs for a cordial breakfast, to make conversation, knowing that her parents were desperate to get to know her (her _parents. . ._ the very word felt fragile and false, surely just another in an endless litany of lies). Snow and Charming had recognized her at once, known that she was the woman they had met in Misthaven before the casting of the Dark Curse, the one they had inexplicably trusted, even when she confessed that she was from the future and there was, as yet, no possible way to break the thrall that they were under. Yet now it _was_ broken, she had been reunited with not just her parents but a vast extended tree of people who apparently knew her and had been waiting for her, had spent twenty-eight years in enchanted sleep before she came. . . before she drove the knife into him, before. . . before. . .

Emma's hands were starting to shake again. Furious with herself, she clutched them hard into the twisted sheets, but that didn't stop them. A fortnight. It had been a fortnight, and if this was supposed to be her happy ending, her hero's reward, the life she was destined for, it damn well didn't feel remotely like it. Nothing felt worth what she had had to pay. Robert Gold had been formally deposed and placed under comfortable house arrest in Kensington Palace, a so-called punishment that made her want to scream every time she thought about it, and as far as she could tell, this was nothing but a prime opportunity for all the enemies he had made in the Royal Society to crawl out of the woodwork, announce that they knew this Scottish ne'er-do-well had been destined to doom them all along, and get things back to the way _they_ thought they should be done instead. Another ambitious career magician, Isaac Heller, had been elevated to the presidency, and was busily doing damage control by buying up every square inch of newspaper space, running constant self-righteous editorials explaining how the citizens of Great Britain had a patriotic duty now more than ever to pull together behind the flag, and deploring the general chaos and disorder that the defeated sorcerer Jafar had caused across Europe. Heller had magnanimously pardoned the surviving Night Market rebels, not wanting to start his tenure off with a massacre or another public-relations fiasco, but it had been made very clear that this munificence came with a pointed sting in the tail. In return for the Royal Society graciously granting them the right to continued existence, the Night Market was expected to adhere to the hygienic, standard, civilized practices of magic, to report on any of its own members who might be harboring seditionist sympathies, and otherwise never forget that they still could be disbanded, outlawed, and destroyed at any minute. _I should never have come home. I should have stayed in the future with Killian, made a life there, and been happy._

Emma, her parents, a few of the others, and Henry had been living in Applewood Hall since the curse had broken; Lady Regina was not in any haste to return from London and face her angry victims, and as far as Emma knew, she was still there with Robin. She couldn't summon up the energy to care about possible retribution for Regina, even if she herself had forbidden any fatal punishment. It didn't feel worth it. In Emma's darkest moments, she wondered why she herself was even still alive, what the point of trying to have any future was, and might have slipped even closer to the edge of the abyss if not for Henry. In her bleary, shattered, staggering mind, he was the one thing she always came back around to as a reason for her survival. She had to live for Henry. What good it was liable to do either of them was another question, but she had to take what she could.

And yet. Grim and difficult and miserable as it was, Emma Swan had plenty of experience in losing people, and had built her walls so high as a consequence, a defense. By now the pain was supposed to be starting to dull, to freeze into the armor of numbness and disregard that enabled her to keep functioning. But instead it was just getting worse, and it was then that she realized what that moment earlier had reminded her of. When she had woken in Jafar's alternate reality in the year 1900, past seventy but still not over the pain of losing Henry and Killian both, a pain that had never ceased or eased or let go its grip on her for a day, making it entirely logical for her to choose to serve as Jafar's personal consigliere and assassin; she would have done it in this world, she knew, and not just in the quickly dismantled alternate reality. _Dismantled because the real Killian came to find me, to save me._ The pain of that loss, having to admit that she couldn't stand it, was what had pushed her to give into her feelings for him that night in Norway, when he told her he was here now, didn't know what would happen, but wanted to comfort her. If she'd let him. As always, waiting for her word.

So, then. She could be quite sure that the grief of losing him was never going to get any less, that she'd have to live for decades this way, a stunted, broken, deformed shell of herself, and the prospect made her quail. But she had just returned from a time-and-space-bending odyssey, gone hundreds of years into the past and then the future, and forced to pay the ultimate price to stay here, in her own place and time. And she was just supposed to accept that there was nothing to be done? No way to travel again? No way to find Killian again?

The glimmer of a dangerous plan began to occur to Emma just then, galvanizing her upright with a sudden clarity she hadn't felt for the last two weeks, not when it seemed as if she was muddling through a world wrapped in sodden grey wool. She staggered across the room to the bowl and pitcher, broke the ice, splashed her face and gasped as the freezing needles stung her skin. She took the lily-of-the-valley soap from the dish, washed, scrubbed her hair out, dried, and dressed; she still felt like living death, but with the cold iron of resolve stiffening her spine, and she would take what she could get right now. She twisted her damp hair into a loose chignon, tugged the laces of her corset straight, and went downstairs.

Snow, Charming, Henry, and an older woman who seemed to be her parents' close confidante – Emma still hadn't heard if she had any other name than "Granny" – were at breakfast when she walked into the dining room, and all of them glanced up, clearly surprised to see her. She hadn't gotten out of bed for about the first five days, as they plied her with possets and potions (Emma made sure not to touch anything she suspected Walsh might have sold for a cracking bargain) and begged her to eat and otherwise were so solicitously concerned that she had finally locked the door, set up a magic barrier, and kept them all out. She wanted to learn how to reconnect with her long-lost family, yes. But more than anything, she didn't want to do it _now._

"Emma?" Snow rose to her feet and crossed the dining room to offer a careful kiss on the cheek; Emma accepted it gingerly, but didn't reciprocate, managing a stiff, awkward smile for the other woman. "It's good to see you up and about, sweetheart. Are you feeling better?"

Emma thought it was reasonably obvious what the answer was, but maintained the smile as she slipped into a chair along the table. It was easier than thinking of something to say in return. Snow had encouraged her to call them "Mother" and "Father," but as they were Emma's same age thanks to being frozen in time for twenty-eight years, not to mention virtual strangers, she couldn't do it. Whatever was being served from Regina's fine porcelain and silver crockery smelled delicious, but her stomach wouldn't unknot long enough for her to know if she was hungry or not. She managed a slightly more genuine smile for Henry, who had been returned a few days ago by a full escort of Norwegian royal airships; apparently Elsa had gotten the ice wall down in time, and Christiana was no longer in danger of being swallowed up by it. Emma had supposed she should try to think of some reward or token of gratitude to the queen for keeping Henry safe, but that had again been more than she felt up to facing. She hoped Elsa understood. It had been a long time since she'd had anyone she'd call a friend.

"So," Snow said tentatively, when no one else made a move to broach the silence. "We've had some time to think about this. We know you've been through a great deal, and we don't want to push you for a decision. But now that we're back together at last, your. . . your father and I have been thinking. . . this world has been nothing but cruel to you. If you wanted to come with us to Misthaven, start to rebuild it after the devastation of the curse. . . you _are_ its crown princess, you know. There would be a new life for you there."

"What?" Jerked from dull contemplation of the scrambled eggs, Emma blinked, confused and wary. "You're going back there? Now?"

"We thought. . ." That was her father. David had proved more intuitively able to understand her, to see that she needed space, to try not to push her too hard; he had been the one to carry her upstairs, inconsolable, after they finally had to take Killian's body away from her. He had been put in the mausoleum, a piece of bitter irony that Emma found almost unbearable; after his sacrifice had liberated her family from their glass coffins and eternal sleep, he himself had been placed in one to commence his own. She had put a preservation spell on him, unable to bear the thought of him rotting away in dust and darkness, so he looked as if he had just closed his eyes a moment ago. Part of her wished she was down there with him, and the rest feared that if she went in, she would never come out. And no matter what, she was still afraid of that. The end. No more trying. No more chances.

"You thought what?" Emma prompted. "That we should all go home and just. . . be a family? I don't. . . I don't think this is the right time for. . ." She pushed her chair back, struggling with her overwhelming old impulse to flee – to run back upstairs, shut the world out, to draw the curtains and bar the doors, be safe in her little citadel. But as hard as it was, she forced herself to stay. _Killian wouldn't want me to run away._ "I can't just. . . pick up and go. I've lived here my entire life. I don't think I'd be much help. I can't rebuild anything right now."

"I understand you're heartbroken," David said gently. "I wish I had a chance to know Killian more than just those few moments in the past, when he was 'Prince Charles.' I think you're right, that I would have liked him." He flashed a faint, crooked grin. "We don't think you should just try to forget him, of course not. But we hoped we could help you heal. Give you the life we always wished you could have had. We know you're not ready for us to just step in and be your parents. Maybe we could. . . we could be your friends first?"

"I. . ." Emma's throat had closed up. "That's. . . very kind of you. I'm sure you're eager to get back to Misthaven. And your offer is kindly meant. . . but I have business left here, in this world. In London."

"In London?" Henry glanced up from his second plate of breakfast. "What for?"

"No reason." Emma's throat was dry. That was, of course, fairly transparently a lie, but hopefully they'd feel uncomfortable about prying too far. "Just. . . my entire life is there, my flat, my work, my belongings. Even if I was to go with you, I'd need to go back first."

Snow and David exchanged a glance. It was plain they had hoped for her to agree at once to accompany them, but as Snow opened her mouth, David shook his head minutely, speaking in that sort of wordless marital shorthand they had fallen directly back into even after being asleep for twenty-eight years. It was a feat to be envied, but all it did was make her heart ache still more. If Killian was here, he would have been able to understand and support her in those same few fleeting looks and small cues, never needing to resort to words. But then, the fact that he _wasn't_ here was the one on which all her trouble rested, and which had to be faced first. _If_ it wasn't possible. . . well, she'd cross that bridge when she came to it, and she prayed with all her might that she never would.

Breakfast concluded in an awkward silence, and Emma went back to her room, pulling a valise from the wardrobe and tossing in the few essentials she'd need; it couldn't be more than a day's journey to London. She could always use her magic and transport herself there in an instant, but she needed the time to think over her plan, to be sure of what she meant to do, and some space might do her good. There were still various details she'd have to make up on the fly, but all those years of bounty hunting experience, and intimate knowledge of the underworld, couldn't be for nothing. She'd find a way.

She bid farewell to her parents, told them to look after Henry until she returned, and walked the few miles from Applewood Hall to the inn in the village; the coach left with the post for London promptly at eleven o'clock. There was still a seat left, so she paid for it, then was forced to wait another half-hour as it transpired that an axle had broken and they could go nowhere until it was fixed. The footman heaved her valise into the roof rack, she ducked in, and closed her eyes, leaning back on the worn velvet seat, trying not to think of the future and all its easy conveniences and advanced transportations. That was pointless, nothing that would help her. She had to remain focused on what was before her, and that alone.

They jounced south down the muddy road. Emma's intended time for crafting her brilliant plan resulted in very little; her back cramped, matching all her various other aches and pains, and a spring from the seat was digging into her thigh. There was an airship station at Sheffield, their next port of call, with its steel foundries and factories to drive the industrial heart of Britain, and she intended to catch the next zeppelin to London from there. It would be far faster and more comfortable than riding all the way in the post-coach, and she felt like one giant bruise by the time they finally bumped into the city. They reached the station, she waited as the footman opened the door and handed her down, then reached for her valise, and –

There was a strangled yelp from the lump that had been hiding under the sackcloth, which was lashed over the trunks on the roof to protect them from the characteristically wonderful English weather, and the next instant, a tousled head popped out. "Wait! Wait for me!"

"Wh – _Henry!"_ Emma's heart almost stopped as her son, impeccably dressed in his schoolboy uniform, muddy shoes and stockings attesting to the fact that he must have diligently trailed her all the way from Applewood Hall and waited until she was distracted before sneaking aboard the coach, tumbled onto the curb in front of her. "Henry, what on _earth do you think you're – "_

"I'm coming with you," Henry panted, brushing himself off and ignoring the startled and disapproving looks from the footmen, who had clearly no idea that an unpaid stowaway had tagged along. "I think I know what you're doing in London, and. . . Mum, you can't do it alone. I won't let you."

"Do you." Emma chewed the inside of her cheek, not sure if she should shout at him, seize him by the ear, and bundle him straight into the next coach heading back to Yorkshire, or give in, accept his help (however much of it an almost twelve-year-old boy could possibly provide) and let him come with her. Admit that it would be nice not to be alone as she tried to do the hardest thing she had ever faced. Faced with the footman still glaring, she made a decision on the spot, tossed him a crown for his trouble, and took Henry by the collar, marching him firmly away. "I'll likely punish you for this later," she warned him, "but fine. Come on."

Henry, as overexcited as a sheepdog in pursuit of a particularly headstrong ram, ran ahead of her as they crossed the bridge to the station terminal, and she firmly ordered him back. She joined the queue, bought two seats on the next departure to London, and did her best to fight her nerves until they stepped into the cabin. Her last flight on an airship had been with Killian, from Stockholm to Paris, and they had passed the time in decidedly adult fashion, a memory that made her stomach twist with mingled need, pleasure, and grief. God, that night when they'd finally come together, when nothing at all had hurt, when there had been no more pain, no more fear. She could barely summon up the ghost of it now, couldn't imagine it ever being all right, until she did this. Or didn't, and. . .

Once more, she pushed the thought away. She sat stiffly in her seat, discouraging Henry's various attempts to get up and explore, as they thrummed through the clouds. She did consent to buy him a chocolate bar from the concessions cart, which he munched in content silence, and had almost managed to snatch a few moments of something approximating peace by the time they descended into the bustling London aerodrome of Grosvenor Terminus. But once they had debarked, the nerves and uncertainty returned in full force. Despite her hours of cogitation, her plan remained incomplete and fragmentary, and she debated where to go for the night; she had her grotty flat in Southwark, but she hadn't been there in months, and her landlord might well have concluded she was dead and leased it out to the next warm body in line. And Henry had grown up in ease and comfort, and she wasn't sure she wanted him to see where she had spent all her time, most of her earnings sent north for his upkeep. This was the first time she had ever been in the city with him, and she wanted, however possible, to make it special.

After she retrieved her valise, they took a cabriolet to one of the higher-class lodging houses Emma had come across during her work; she, after all, knew this place intimately, had lived here for years, in its legitimate quarters and far more often its illegitimate ones. She was posing as a wealthy widowed lady, here to enroll her son in school at King's College, as she didn't know how far the tale of her part in the events of a fortnight ago had spread, and didn't want to find out. She might still have to work in the underworld again, after all, and discretion was a long-learned habit. It had not stopped her, however, from giving her name to the clerk as _Jones._

A common name, she told herself. The commonest of all names, and therefore unworthy of any second glances or scrutiny. Yet by the time she and Henry had been shown to their room, all her strength was gone and she was unable to do anything besides collapse on the bed and pull the lacy pillows over her head. This burst of activity after two weeks of isolation and agony was almost too much for her, and she marveled painfully at how easily, constantly resilient she had been, even in far worse circumstances, as long as she had Killian at her side. There seemed no greater proof of the devastation of his loss than comparing it to the miracle of his presence. God, she needed him back. She needed it more than breath in her body, than the sun on her face, than to stand upright or know her own name.

She slept badly, waking up every time Henry rolled over and the bedstead squeaked, and was up before dawn, dressing and pulling on her boots and an array of far more interesting accessories, even knowing it would be hours until they could present themselves at Kensington and sue for an audience. Once more, the sense of coming twistedly full circle made her almost dizzy; she had visited Kensington in the first place to take Gold's commission hunting down Killian, signed the contract without reading it – the action that had bound her to the command of the _arthame_ when Jafar used it to control her and Gold, the one that she had then used to stab Killian and. . .

No, she couldn't keep going in circles like this, even if it took everything she had not to pace a groove into the floorboards until Henry woke up. They collected themselves, headed downstairs, and out into the cold, misty morning; it was December, greens and garlands bedecking the public squares, and once again she had to struggle with the remembrance of falling into Killian's memory of Christmas with his brother, when they had tripped the magical trap under St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. She couldn't get away from him anywhere, would have no respite. But she drew herself together, got them a hackney, and rode to Kensington Palace.

Henry's eyes were the size of boiled eggs by the time they pulled up; evidently, he had not realized that their destination was quite so prestigious. Emma sternly warned him to be on his best behavior; there was no leeway for anything to go wrong. He meekly agreed to be good, and with this promise extracted, they passed under the portico, knocked, and waited.

Last time the door had been answered by Belle, Gold's maid and the one Killian had shot in Monaco, but this time it was an unfamiliar servant in starched livery who opened it, surveyed them critically, and appeared only marginally impressed by Emma's eloquent plea that she was here to offer the new President of the Royal Society whatever friendship and cooperation she could. But at last he seemed to cotton on to who she was, that it would be to Heller's benefit if he could get her on his side, and told her to wait. They stood in the foyer, Emma doing her best not to use her magic to track down where in the building Gold was being held, march in, and throttle him on the spot, until at last the servant returned, conducted them through the labyrinthine hallways to the office at the back, bowed, and absented himself.

Emma waited tersely until in several more minutes, just to prove that he could be fashionably late and thus control the terms of the meeting, Isaac Heller deigned to make his entrance. He was a short man with a faintly ratlike air, which she mistrusted at once, but he was charity incarnate when confronted with her. After all, they shared a common enemy in Gold, whom Heller called the biggest bastard he had ever had the displeasure of dealing with until remembering that he was in the presence of a lady and attempting to apologize – not that Emma disagreed with a word of it. He was happy to promise that he would push the Society for more stringent terms of Gold's confinement, seeing as there were plenty of Fellows who felt that this downfall had been a long time coming, but he instantly turned far more weaselly when Emma brought up the topic of Jafar. "My dear, _that_ miscreant has been safely stowed where he belongs. He won't be let out of that bottle for the next thousand years or so, if we can help it."

"Of course." Emma sipped from the china cup of Earl Grey, though it tasted flavorless in her mouth, and set it back on the saucer. "But you must understand my interest in being quite certain he has been put down. I was one of those to suffer the most from his outrages, and if I could be assured that he was controlled by your wise purview – "

Heller preened, apparently not at all impervious to flattery, especially when she leaned forward and put a hand on his knee. "He's there." He pointed to the glass-paned cabinet, where the glyph-etched bronze bottle could be seen on pride of display. "A great victory for the Royal Society, English magic and British politics alike. I'll find a way to write him out of this altogether, mark my words. Though not before the public properly appreciates the magnitude of the disaster we've saved them from. I know Jafar had his little supporters, doubtless even some in the Government itself, and I'll find them, root them out, and – "

Most likely he could have gone on for quite a while in this vein, but sadly, he never got the chance. Emma closed her fist, then punched a short, bright burst of magic into his face, sending the newly elected President of the Royal Society ignominiously off his brocaded armchair and headfirst into his even more costly carpet. While he was thus unavailable for interference and Henry was goggling at her, she darted across the room, undid the locking spell on the cabinet, removed Jafar's bottle with fumbling fingers, and stuffed it into her valise. Then she pulled out one of the fake bottles Walsh had made back in Norway and put a quick glamour spell on it, so it looked exactly like the one she had just filched, and placed it back into the cabinet. All of this heist operation had taken place in less than a minute, and Heller was starting to groan from the floor, so she trotted over and helped him up as he was still blinking. "My lord, you're all right? You're not hurt?"

"Fine, fine," Heller assured her manfully, rubbing his eyes. "What the devil just happened?"

"I'm not entirely sure. It may have been a bad reaction to the magic you keep here. . . ladies, you know, we have delicate temperaments." Emma looked as vulnerable and potentially prone to swooning as she could. "Well, we've taken up enough of your precious time. We'll be on our way."

Heller hastened to assure her that as a conscientious public servant, his door was always open to the hoi polloi, and then (with evident relief) waved them on their way. Henry had managed to bite his tongue through this entire affair, but once they were outside in the hackney, he burst out, "What was – weren't we there to get him to punish Gold?"

"No," Emma said grimly, closing her hand around the solid warmth of the bronze bottle in her bag. "We were here for this."

Henry looked both confused and awed at having finally seen her in action, perhaps getting an idea of just how formidable the Black Swan actually was, and maintained a compliant silence the rest of the way back to their boarding house. Now came the tricky part. She didn't want Henry anywhere near what she had to do next, and she didn't want to tip him off to the danger, so she finally gave him a few shillings and told him to visit the confectioner's down the block. It was a sufficiently delightful place, full of sweets and candies and chocolates and marvelous magical delicacies, to command a twelve-year-old's attention for hours, and hopefully the only potential trouble he could get in was sugar stupor or perhaps some older boys mocking him for his northern accent (despite the best efforts of the village school, Henry still sounded distinctly Yorkshire, not London). Henry may have suspected he was being bought off, if the jaundiced look he gave her was any indication, but as she'd hoped, it was enough of a temptation that he decided not to question his good fortune. He took the money and scampered.

Emma let out a breath, shut the door behind him and made sure it was locked, then closed the curtains, pinned back her hair, and rolled up her sleeves. There were any number of ways this could go, only a few of them well, and the last thing she needed was neighbors peering over chimneys or gossiping over washing lines. She performed a few spells to seal off sound inside and out, and shoved the furniture aside. Then she went to her bag, pulled out a thick black stub of grease chalk, and began marking a complex pentacle on the floor, written and overwritten with a hardy system of locks, checks, and wards. She knew the risk she was running, and no matter her desperation, she did not intend to rush into this completely blind.

It took her a while, as this was not a brand of magic that she knew much of, or indeed that was considered respectable at all, demonology having died out on a practical level once the civilized art of aether science came along to replace it – after all, why deal with such subtle and sophisticated entities, always at the risk of accidentally dooming yourself to hell for all eternity or having your entrails eaten by a flock of crows, if there was no need for it, if you could do exactly what you needed with no middleman? It was in the Hellfire Club that Emma had learned what little she knew of it, and had filed it away for potential later use. And while she didn't know exactly what Jafar had become upon his confinement in the bottle, it was comparable to the highest and most dangerous orders of spirits at least, and the same precautions would be taken.

At last, she finished, double checked her ancient Syriac runes – this was one of the formulae employed by King Solomon to summon and bind the djinni he had used to build the Temple of Jerusalem, and seeing as the _arthame_ was associated with his supposed grimoire, the _Key of Solomon,_ it made the most sense to stick with his magic – and picked up the bronze bottle. By means of another spell, she conveyed it to the center of the pentacle, and it glowed hot as the bonds took hold of it. Then with another breath to steady herself, she commanded, "Open."

The lid of the bottle unscrewed, and a thick red smoke issued out, lapping at the edges of the chalked star, finding it well constructed and without weakness, and recoiling back to the center. Emma caught a glimpse of demonic eyes glowing like coals in the middle of the fug, followed by sepulchral screaming and other duly unnerving sound effects, and then all at once, Jafar materialized in the center of the pentacle, extravagantly unruffled, flicking an imaginary mote of dust off his lapel. "My dear. How truly capital to see you again."

"You." Emma regarded him as unemotionally as she could, knowing she would have to be very careful, safeguards or no safeguards, and unwilling to give him any insight into the reason she was seeking out his help – even if she'd have to come to it eventually. "How's captivity treating you?"

Jafar shrugged. "Cramped, pedestrian, boring, and pointless, and those are only its good qualities. But I was sure you would see the sense of my petition in time, and hasten to rescue me from my predicament – isn't that what the savior does, after all? And you seem to finally be in the business these days. Took a great deal of dithering, but better late than never."

"Not really." Emma forced herself to continue meeting his gaze, cold and calculating and even. "You've been sitting in the office of the new President of the Royal Society for the past two weeks. Tell me what he's like."

"Is that an _order?"_ Jafar raised one exquisitely manicured black eyebrow, another gesture that reminded her painfully of Killian. "True, by the usual tedious rules of this djinni business, I have to grant you three wishes if you release me from the bottle – the stipulations being, of course, that number one, I cannot make anyone fall in love, number two, I cannot bring anyone back from the dead, and number three, you cannot wish for more wishes. Please don't tell me you'll wish for money, immortality, and beauty, just like the rest of the sheep. I daresay you possess two of the three qualities already, Miss Swan, so it would do you very little good."

"That so?" Emma smiled back at him. "How kind of you, but flattery won't work on me. A while ago, when we were still. . . not entirely aligned in our interests, you created an alternate reality where you were Prime Minister and I was your right-hand woman. I'm sure you recall, it was very memorable. A reality where I believed that the pirate was dead. If we were to work together in some fashion. . . could you create a reality where he was alive?"

Jafar cocked his head, surveying her intently. _"Work together?_ Why, my dear, I have waited an eternity to hear those words pass your lovely lips. You are correct that to have any hope of achieving this plan, you would require my cooperation. The first two bottles of this set are already woven into the magic of your home world, and you could not take this third bottle there and use it for your intended purpose unless you first liberated me of my inconvenient attachment to it. That would be the easiest and most straightforward solution, you know. Free me, let me deal with our common enemy in the Royal Society, go to Misthaven, and use the power of the three bottles to change reality to suit yourself. Overthrow and rewrite the very laws of magic. Have your pirate back." He tutted sympathetically. "I'm sure you must miss him very much."

Emma opened and shut her mouth, not entirely sure how to respond. Seeing the hunger in her face, however, must have been more than enough, as Jafar pressed his case. "England for me. Misthaven for you. You can count on me, of course, to do what needs to be done. You certainly won't have to worry about Robert Gold having such a farcically light and easy punishment, to say the least. That is only the first of the injustices I will correct."

Emma hesitated. She couldn't deny that she was fiercely tempted, but even as she was, there was still something she couldn't get around. "The last time you asked us to trust you, and we worked with you even a bit, you twisted the situation around, manipulated us, wanted me and Gold to kill each other, put the first two bottles into the magic of Misthaven, and came very close to taking over the world again, in even more dramatic fashion than your first plan. Why on earth would I believe you wouldn't do the same thing again once I freed you?"

"Why on earth, indeed?" Jafar looked surprised that she would even ask. "My dear, we are friends – may I presume to use that word? Too intimate? No? Acquaintances, then. Cordial enemies. I see no reason for empty promises and meaningless subterfuge. You know exactly the sort of man I am – and the sort of men the Royal Society are. You know what I will do, you know what they will do. All that remains unsolved, then, is what _you_ will do. It certainly was not fair in the least the way you had to sacrifice our dear captain. So why must _fair_ factor into what you have to do to get him back? The world deserves to suffer for taking such a love from you. It started this war. It is the one at fault, not you. All you have to do is pay it back in kind."

 _Killian wouldn't want me to give into revenge._ She had to fixate on that thought, hard as it was to keep hold of in the face of Jafar's smooth, alluring promises, as tempting for her as those chocolates and sweeties for Henry. Not after he had chosen to defeat that primal urge, that black motivating passion, to turn his back on it, to give up his happiness, and his life, for her own. But if choosing the moral high ground meant losing him forever. . . Emma couldn't stand the thought. _He died to take the darkness out of me._ But he'd been a pirate for his entire adult life, cheerily flouting every rule that did not suit him, hell-bent on a vigilante crusade, and they both knew how extraordinarily unfair and tyrannical the law and the Royal Society alike both were. Fighting such corrupt institutions could not be all wrong, or perhaps wrong at all. Surely.

"So," Jafar concluded, seeing she had no answer for him. "There is what I can do for you, as surely you knew, elsewise you would not have launched such a daring raid to steal my bottle from Kensington Palace. And with your son along? I'm sure he'll make a fine bounty hunter one day."

"No," Emma said. "No, I don't want him to grow up in this world."

"Of course. We all hope the best for our children. Come now, Miss Swan. It's so simple. Free me from this intolerable detainment, take the bottle to Misthaven, and do what you must. Bring the captain back to life. Have that future you deserve, whether in this time and place or any other. Once you are mistress of one world, and I master of the other, we can divide it up as we please. I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities for cooperation and counsel. I do genuinely like you, you know, and I can say that for almost none of the people I've ever encountered. If your endeavors with the pirate somehow fail, you would be sure to find solace and comfort at my door. Or other pieces of furniture, I must say."

"So you offer the chance for me to enslave Misthaven on one hand, and you to enslave England, Europe, the world on the other? Turn me into Regina, and you into Gold? Start the cycle all over again, until someone else comes along to overthrow us?" Emma felt unfathomably weary. "It will happen, you know. Empires always fall."

"So they do," Jafar agreed. "Any even moderately astute student of history could grasp that at a glance. But your life will be marvelous until it does, so why not take the time you have? Being happy is a very dangerous thing, Miss Swan, which is why so many people run away from it at every chance they have. Would rather live in powerless misery, where they have no control, rather than seizing the day and doing what it takes. The captain did whatever was necessary to save _you._ Would it not mean that you loved him less, that everything Robert Gold accused you of was true, if you could not find it within your heart to do the same for him?"

"I – no." Instinctively Emma wanted to refute him, but was not sure how – or even if she could. In her memory she heard Gold trying to force her to admit she loved Killian, that she hadn't just let him in because it was necessary for survival – and her own weakness in being unable to do so, the crack that had opened the door for the darkness to get its grip on Killian's soul. "No. I'm going to save him. No matter what."

"Then why are you delaying?" Jafar enquired sleekly. "The course of action is clear. Perhaps you are not entirely certain. Perhaps you fear that no matter what you feel, or have _convinced_ yourself you feel, Killian Jones is not so different from the riffraff who have broken your heart before. That you would get him back. . . and eventually he'd let you down somehow, or not be who you thought, or leave you. It's no wonder you'll always be alone, my dear, if that's the standard you demand from every potential romantic partner. It is always easier to love a memory in absentia, than it is to extend such forgiveness to a flesh-and-blood man. Is it safer for you if he stays dead? That way you can always remember him as the hero who died to save you and your family, and never let him have the chance to do anything that might muff it up. In which case, I _am_ still available, you know."

"You're crazy if you think I'd ever fall in love with you," Emma said flatly. "That I'd ever want you more than him. I don't care what I could _make_ happen, whatever laws of magic I could change. What happened between Killian and me had nothing to do with force, with power, with conquering and dominating. It was _real._ And I want that, or nothing."

"Most romantic of you. Naïve and misguided and destined to lead you straight for more heartbreak, yes, but romantic, that cannot be denied." Jafar tapped his fingers together. "But you do realize in this scenario, you would have to do exactly what you just said you wouldn't. _Force_ him back to life, _force_ the laws of magic to be changed, rearrange it all to suit yourself. After you didn't give him a choice when you bound him to the dark magic in the first place. And while my acquaintance with the captain was of a different sort than yours, I know the man well enough. I can't imagine that would be something he'd want or appreciate."

Emma flinched. Once again, despite the thousand and one ulterior motives operating barely veiled beneath Jafar's words, he was devastatingly correct. A panicked inner voice was screaming at her, warning her that she might be burning her only bridge back to Killian, but she knew at least that she was in dark and dangerous waters well over her head, that to underestimate Jafar in any shape or form would have the most ruinous of consequences, and that he was still, as much as she hated the Royal Society, the greater danger. At least the Royal Society were largely concerned with maintaining the status quo, unjust and oppressive as it was – wanted a peaceful existence with themselves at the top. Jafar, however, was an agent of uncontrolled chaos, of wanting to turn everything and everyone upside down and sideways, and all the careful runes she had drawn to keep him contained would not be enough if she made the mistake of loosing him herself. And then, even if she could get Killian back in body, it would make no matter. She would have destroyed not just his heart, but his soul, hers, and everyone else's, an act even worse than the Dark Curse and whatever other malfeasances Regina and Gold had wrought on England and Misthaven alike. And that, simply, she could not do.

"I dismiss you, spirit," she said. "Return from whence you came."

This was not what Jafar had expected to hear, and he frowned, taking a step – before the wards flared, pushed him back, and he had time only for a strangled shout of protest before the red smoke frothed up, engulfed him, and he was sucked back into the bottle with a loud popping noise. At another gesture from Emma, the lid was screwed firmly back into place, and the pentacle went dark as she fell back, gasping. She had been close, so close to doing it, and it terrified her. The agony of loss surged through her again, scouring her, tossing her like breakers on rock; she had been about to see Killian again, to run to him, and he would turn his head and smile and say that he was proud she had done whatever necessary to. . .

And yet, she could not picture it. Hard as she tried, she could not. There had to be another way to do this, to do this right, and it occurred to her then that in the Night Market, before it had been destroyed, there had been any number of mediums and witches who would (for a hefty fee, of course) summon up the ghosts of your lost loved ones and allow you to commune with them. Even in non-magical sections of Victorian society, séances and spirit readings and interest in the occult and supernatural was a considerable occupation, and she had never seen anything to make her believe that the actual practitioners in the Market could not at least achieve a rudimentary result of what they claimed. If she was going ahead with this, and there was nothing she would allow to stop her, the first step was to speak to Killian. To find out if he even _wanted_ to be saved.

The thought almost killed her, but it also provided another of those moments of freezing clarity, when she could see things more or less from a coldly rational point and not the hectic, shattered shards of her brutally broken heart. Tonight, then. It would have to be tonight, once Henry was asleep and she could leave this place bewitched to protect him. Descend into the Market, whatever it was now, and come face to face with destiny.


	34. Chapter 34

The last daylight lingered on the highest windows of the handsome edifices of brick and brownstone, making the leaded glass shine like molten gold, but down in the streets it was already deep violet-blue dusk, gaslamps being fired and braziers glowing cozily. As she shouldered through the narrow lanes, trying not to smell the tantalizing odors of roasting meat and nuts and other savories from the food stalls, all of which had Henry making a hangdog expression that both reminded her unwelcomingly of Neal and gave the impression that he had never been fed a decent scrap in his life, Emma said tersely, "Keep up, kid. We're on a schedule."

Henry obediently quickened his pace, not without one last longing look at an entire chicken being turned lusciously on a spit. Emma scanned for a decent alley, somewhere well off the usual thoroughfares. Her heart was pounding, her throat felt raw, and her palms were cold and clammy, her nerves jangling like a broken harpsichord – never a way to walk into a job to start with, and especially not one as all-consuming as this. She wasn't sure what she'd find in the Night Market, or for that matter, _who._ Nor had she been planning to bring Henry along, of course, but he had taken one look at her after returning from the confectioner's, fingers sticky with chocolate, and known _something_ had happened. All her carefully casual attempts to get him to go to bed and forget about it had come to nothing, and finally he had informed her that the only way to prevent him from accompanying her was to knock him out and tie him up right then. He knew Killian too, he reminded her. He had been the one who thought Killian had come to bring Emma to Applewood Hall to break the curse (which Emma supposed in an unbearably ironic way, he had). "He believed in me and the enchanted vault and your destiny before you did," Henry said, one of those devastatingly effective blackmail lines that hit brutally home and left her impotent and sputtering. "The least I can do is believe in him in return. I'm going to help you save him, Mum, and you can't stop me."

Emma debated whether to tell him it wasn't likely to be that simple, still wrestling with the voice in her head that told her she was a thumping fool to bring Henry into the middle of the underworld, even whatever diminished and enervated form of it might exist after the battle and Gold's defeat (if it could be called that). Then again, at least this way she'd be able to keep an eye on him, and as she obviously was not going to knock him out and tie him up, she grumblingly had to concede that he had called her bluff. Hence why they were here, fumbling along a dark alley to a hopefully suitable door at the end. Would Robin and the Merry Men have rebuilt enough of it for there even to be something to open into? What if it didn't work the same as before? What if she was cut off from this, her slender chance, her only hope of –

She shook herself, forcing down the panicky chorus. As Henry observed in keen curiosity, she removed her Night Market key, fit it into the keyhole, and felt a faint and familiar tremble travel up it. She twisted, and the door swung open. Pulling Henry back as he tried to go first, she stepped through, helped him in after her, closed it, and stood tensely, waiting. Blinked once, then twice, and began to make out scattered, shadowed shapes in the gloom.

The Market was here, all right. It was the first time Emma had seen it since the night it had been destroyed, when she had barely escaped ahead of Gold's storm troopers, and she felt an involuntary prickle of tears under her lashes. A few stalls had hung out their shingles, colored lamps burning and a small crowd mingling through the common square, looking over the wares for sale and conversing in the familiar hubbub. But it was nowhere near its former glory, when it had been acres and acres of magical merchants and mysteries, changing every night and nearly a realm unto itself. For that matter, Emma wondered what purpose it would serve now that the curse was broken. After all, it was not exactly in either Misthaven or Earth, but somewhere just between, the meeting place, the bridge that connected both worlds. Would it be renewed from the devastation of the Dark Curse, would it follow the Royal Society's orders to keep its head down and practice only civilized magic? (That possibility at least seemed to be safely counted out.) But who knew how long it would take, and she felt the guilt of it twist in her stomach like a knife. _Not me. Not my crime. Gold's._ Yet it hung over her nonetheless, impossible to escape from.

Emma took a deep breath. "Stay close to me," she ordered Henry, who was already staring around in delight. "This place is dangerous. And definitely don't eat anything. Otherwise you could be, I don't know, turned into a giant canary that only sings Mozart."

Henry manfully quashed his disappointment and straightened his tie. "As you say, Mother," he said, clearing his throat and attempting to sound older. "Where do we start?"

"I don't know," Emma muttered, surveilling the stalls on offer and trying to repress another pang of fear that her desired practitioners would not be among them. The only way to find out was to start looking, and she tucked her skirt into her boots and started forward, doing her best to look nonchalant. Aye, she had every right to be here, every right, been here plenty before, just another night and just another job, nothing but –

She caught the blur out of the corner of her eye just a fraction of a second too late, and the next instant, was sprawled flat on her face, gulping vainly for air, as her unseen assailant whacked her smartly again with an extremely solid stick. She could hear Henry yelling in protest, and rolled to her knees with magic flaring around her fingers, only to catch another blow in the gut and double over. It was two men – no, three, possibly more – gathering in with massively unfriendly expressions. "That's the one! That's the bitch what sold us out! Get her!"

"Henry, _run!"_ Emma wheezed, dodging another blow from the stick. But instead he hesitated, then clenched his fists, lowered his head, and charged directly at the stick-wielder, ramming his head into the man's stomach like a cannonball, and as they went tottering backwards in a whirl of arms, legs, and curses, this bought Emma just enough time to spring to her feet. She had just prepared herself to perform some spell – anything non-lethal, she couldn't risk hitting Henry by accident – and thinking it was just her luck to be assaulted by a gang of vigilantes two minutes into her return, when an arrow hissed over their heads. It was followed by a second, and a sudden, startled silence fell. The gang looked around in confusion – then spotted the archer and visibly flinched.

"That's enough," Robin of Locksley said, lowering his bow. "Let her go."

"Robin!" Emma didn't think she'd ever been so happy to see someone in her life. To judge from the way the troublemakers were instantly picking themselves up and sloping off with muttered apologies, he was indeed a figure of some authority, if not _the_ authority, in the new Night Market, and he ruffled Henry's hair as the boy ran over to greet him. Emma caught her breath, picked herself up, and made her way to join them. "You've – you've done well at restoring it. It looks almost like its old self."

Robin smiled wryly. "We've been doing our best. But we didn't expect to see you. We'd heard you were back, Will told us, but he didn't know anything beyond what happened when you confronted Jones and Jafar and Gold in St. Paul's Cathedral, said Hook took you away in a cloud of smoke and he didn't know what. . . "

"Killian is dead." It was the first time Emma had managed to say the three terrible words together, and she almost felt her knees buckle, but forced herself to stay strong. "He made me kill him in order to free the darkness from us and break the curse. I can imagine you know that, if Regina's anywhere nearby. We didn't exactly expect to see her running back to Yorkshire to take the blame."

Robin inclined his head. "Yes, Regina's here. She's been working with me, as a matter of fact. She misses you, Henry. She would have gone to see you, but she. . . didn't think it was the time."

"No," Emma said bitterly. "Not after what it cost me."

"Perhaps that's why she's helping to restore the Night Market," Robin suggested gently. "I will not tell you what to feel for her, but. . . you are not the only one who has been changed by this ordeal, Emma. It's quite something, seeing your most terrible deeds reflected at you like a mirror, and having the choice to embrace them once and for all, or to struggle to turn away, no matter how painful and terrible and costly. I do not defend what she has done, but I also do not think it is something she wishes to return to. For what it is worth."

Emma was about to come back with a sharp remark, but it died in her throat as she thought again of what she had said to Jafar, about his plan to make her into Regina and him into Gold, starting the cycle of conquest and vengeance and sorcerous subjugation afresh, renew the darkness' hold across England and Misthaven all over again. That she and Killian both had stood at the brink of ultimate power, and looking in that mirror, rejected it, at the greatest and most monumental cost. She still couldn't say she was eager to see Regina, or think they bore the same weight of guilt and wrongdoing, but it was enough to make her say tightly, "Well, then. We need to start somewhere. If she means what she says, maybe she'll help."

"Help?" Robin blinked. "Help do what?"

"I'll explain later." Emma made a quick gesture. "Let's go."

Robin paused, then nodded, slung his bow back over his shoulder, and led them down into the Market. By old reflex, Emma looked for Jefferson, but there was no sign of the Hatter. It hit her suddenly that the "other world" he was always talking about, struggling to get to no matter what, the reason he had made so many of those enchanted hats, must have been Misthaven, but the curse prevented the way from being fully open. Had he gone home now? Had he found what he was looking for? Had anything, anywhere, come of this but pain?

She sniffed, making sure Henry and Robin couldn't see her face, and knuckled her hand brusquely over her eyes. She tried to lose herself in the old pleasures of the Market – she had always considered it the closest thing she had to home, had that been because she had felt the connection to Misthaven somehow? But everything was scarred and smaller and shattered, just like her, and she felt the ache desolately by the time Robin reached a tent, pushed the flap aside, and beckoned them through with a jerk of his head. "In here."

Emma stepped through into a space that was much larger than the outside would suggest – there must be some sort of magical extension charm at work. The inside of the tent was hung with partitions to make several rooms, and in one of these, Regina was bent over some sort of heavy old book, frowning and muttering. In another, a few of the Merry Men were conferring in low voices. But they all broke off on her approach, and one of them glanced up and grinned. "Bloody hell! What're you doing here?"

Emma opened and shut her mouth, not knowing how to answer, and to her own surprise, let Will trot over and give her a hug. She clung to him for a long moment, absurdly comforted by his presence and familiarity and no-nonsense solidness, until he stepped back, took her by the shoulders, and surveyed her critically. "Oy, you look terrible. What's wrong?"

She groped for words, not wanting to face the ordeal of explanation again, but at that moment Regina shut the book and stood up. "Hen. . . . Henry?"

"Hello, Mother." Henry shoved his hands into his pockets and stayed where he was.

"What are you – " Regina caught sight of Emma, realized who had brought him here, and looked about to upbraid her for exposing Henry to the dangers of this place, before biting her tongue. "Henry, I didn't expect. . . "

"I'm here to help her," Henry announced, pointing at Emma. "You can help us too, or stay out of the way."

"Help?" Will frowned. "Help why? What's goin' on? What'd I miss? Where's Jones? Didn't think he'd be more than six inches from your side – twelve, if he strained. Or did he – "

Catching sight of Emma's face, however, was all the explanation he needed. He shut his mouth and looked away, for once and uncharacteristically with absolutely nothing to say, and a dark, heavy silence reigned like a thundercloud over the tent. The other Merry Men murmured excuses and showed themselves out, clearly not wanting to be caught in the middle of this, and at that, Robin apparently grasped just what Emma's purpose in visiting the Market tonight actually was. "Are you. . . are you planning to try. . . ."

"Yes," Emma said coolly. "I need to find a way to contact him first, though. See if. . . if he wants to come back. I didn't give him a choice before, and that. . . went badly. I need Killian. I don't care what the consequences are. I need him."

The rawness and agony in her voice made all of them flinch, and nobody spoke for a long moment. Then Regina said, "Miss Swan. . . necromancy, trying to restore lost loved ones. . . I tried it. With my first love, Daniel. It only made him into a monster, and I had to kill him again for his own sake. You can't do this. It won't be what you want. You have to accept that."

"Why?" Emma lashed out. "Accept I have to lose him because his life was the price it took to break _your_ curse, that you just know best and we shouldn't even try? There has to be some way, and you owe it to me! You owe me! You took away my happiness, my family, my entire world, and now. . . " She inhaled a deep, shaky breath, teetering on the edge of control. "I don't really want to do this. Ask you for help, that is. But we share a son, and if you helped me with this, I might actually believe you wanted to change. To do better. So just tell me. Yes or no. Can you contact a spirit in the afterlife?"

Regina was clearly about to argue, but Robin put a hand on her arm, and she once more bit back whatever she had been going to say. Then she said, "Yes. There's a ritual. I know it."

"Then do it." Emma stared her down. "Now."

Regina still looked reluctant, but she caught Henry's eye, saw something that decided her, and turned away in a whirl of skirts, spreading a cloth on her table, removing a queer double-ended candle – one side white, the other side black – and setting it on a bronze rack. Then she took down an old cauldron, kindled a fire beneath it with a snap of her fingers, and stirred ingredients intently into the potion. Emma watched her like a hawk, not quite thinking that Regina would take the opportunity for further mischief, but not entirely counting it out either. She knew the other woman was an extremely formidable sorceress – was in fact learning just how much – and tried to trust in Regina's competence and genuine love for Henry, even as everything else remained on shaky ground. She just needed her to contact Killian, that was all. After that, they could go back to doing this themselves.

There wasn't much talk as Regina finished the potion, removed a set of porcelain cups and saucers, and poured the substance into each, placing one at each chair. When Will reached for his, she smacked his hand away. "Don't drink that. It's a deadly poison for opening the dark vortex."

"What's wrong with a nice Earl Grey?" Will muttered, but backed off, eyeing the steaming cup with rank mistrust. He, Emma, Henry, and Robin took seats around the table at Regina's gesture, as Regina herself took a taper and lit the white end of the candle. A sudden wind whooshed around the tent, plunging the rest of the lamps into darkness, and Emma felt a an icy chill on the back of her neck. Sounds from outside seemed to have become mysteriously hushed, and she felt something both terror and exhilaration at the idea that she might be speaking to Killian in a few moments. But what if he didn't want. . . what if he was at rest at last, safe from the tempest, beneath the waves. . .

"Take hands," Regina instructed tersely, sliding into the place between Robin and Henry, and Emma reached out to grasp hold of her son and Will; he squeezed her hand reassuringly. "Close your eyes and focus on the spirit we wish to bring forth. You call him, Miss Swan." She held out the burning taper. "Three times. Then light the other end of the candle."

Emma let go of Will to reach out and take it with suddenly nerveless fingers. Henry held tighter, silently encouraging her, and as everyone else closed their eyes and squinted in concentration, she made herself keep her own attention from wandering. She cleared her throat, and swallowed hard. "Killian Jones," she said, clearly and loudly as she could. "Killian Jones, Killian Jones." And touched the flame to the black end of the candle.

At once, there was an eerie blue-white flare, and some dark essence swirled up from the teacups, dancing and cavorting toward the roof of the tent – yet the roof wasn't there anymore. Instead it had opened up into a strange _hole,_ a sucking maw of blackness, darker even than a night without stars, whirling and whirling like an ocean maelstrom but in reverse. The blue glow grew stronger, a light coming from the end of the tunnel, coalescing into a fist-sized orb and spreading its tendrils, growing stronger, as she almost shut her own eyes against the glare but refused to look away. Then there was a pop, faint at first and then again, much louder, that rattled the walls of the tent, and Killian's face, outlined in sapphire flame, was bobbing in midair above the burning candle, staring at her with an expression of shock and disbelief. His lips moved, but if he spoke, she couldn't hear him.

"Killian?" Emma's own voice was almost a sob. "Killian? Can you see me? Killian!"

This time, she could make out something, a sound, as if it had been spoken very far away, and was drifting toward her on the wind. "Sw. . . . Swan?"

"Yes. Yes, it's me." She couldn't take her eyes off him, even this ghostly, insubstantial mirage, that her fingers would pass through like smoke if she tried to touch. "Killian, are you. . . are you. . . "

Some of the hissing and echoing went silent, and his voice came through louder and closer, though still sounding hollow and sepulchral. "What's going on? How are you speaking to me? Lass – you're not dead too? Christ, don't tell me – "

"No, I'm alive." It hurt her all over again that she would call him up from the grave where she had sent him, and his first and only concern would be for her well-being, not his own. "I'm in the Night Market. Robin, Regina, Will, and Henry helped me reach you."

"The curse?" His shadowed eyes searched hers. "Your family?"

"It's broken. They're fine." Emma swallowed a sob. "You saved them all. You're a hero. But I. . . I'm not. I can't live like this, I can't stand it. Not without you." Despite her best efforts, her voice was heaving and struggling, stumbling and cracking, into the mountains and valleys and endless, depthless seas of her grief. "I know I didn't give you a choice when I put the darkness into you, when I was trying to save your life after Gold stabbed you. So I have to ask this time. Kil. . . Killian, do you even want me to try to bring you back?"

He stared at her, stunned. "Lass. . . I can't ask that of you. Nobody's done it. The only real way would be changing the laws of magic, the very thing Jafar was trying to – "

"I know," Emma said wretchedly. "I already stole his bottle from Kensington. I was willing to work with him, let him create another alternate reality, if you would be there. I didn't, but. . . " Another sob welled up and choked out of her. "I can't say I'll never be tempted again, if there's no other. . . "

"No," Killian said urgently. "No, love. Don't give Jafar exactly what he wants. My life isn't worth that. Emma. . . have a future. With your son, your family, everything that's – "

" _That's not good enough!"_ Emma shouted. Tears were spilling thick and fast down her face by now, and she could barely get the words out. "Nothing is worth it without you!"

He blinked, bobbing over the candle – it was burning through quickly, and she knew that when it went out, so did this tenuous connection to him. She thought his eyes were wet, if a dead man could be said to cry, and the image flickered as if he was straining with all his might to break the veil between them, to reach out and touch her, comfort her. But he couldn't, and she shook with the force of her weeping, cold and alone, barely feeling the presence of the silent others around her, gathered like a sentinel of standing stones. "Killian," she sobbed. "I can't lose you. I can't let you go. But if that's what. . . if that's what you want. . . ."

"Of course it's not what I want." His voice was very soft and very sad, trembling on the edge of the same desolation. "I want to be back with you, love. More than anything. I want to see how the world moves toward that future we visited. I want to wake up at your side every morning, just as we did there. But I can't ask you to put yourself in terrible danger to do it."

"How?" Emma looked up, wild-eyed. "Is there a way? Another way? Aside from Jafar's?"

"Only death can pay for life," Killian said. His voice was starting to come fainter, as if he was moving away from her, back into the cold dark arms of eternity. "You would have to sacrifice someone, and I can't ask anyone else to die for me. And it has to be voluntary. You can't just kill anyone and have it work. The magic is older. . . . deeper. . . . stronger."

Emma groped for words. She couldn't tell him that it would be so, as she didn't know if anyone apart from her was willing to die for him, and that would be completely counterproductive in terms of reuniting them, making him be the one to live without her. All she could manage instead, through her tears, was, "I'm not giving up on you. We'll find a way. I love you."

"I love you too." It was no more than a whisper, barely heard, as the sea claimed him again. "Don't give up, Emma. Don't give up."

And with that, and a sputtering noise, the black end of the candle burned out and his face vanished, leaving only a wisp of curling smoke in its place. She stared at it, feeling raw and violated and broken all over again, struggling to draw air into her lungs. It was a very long moment before she could even stand to raise her head, to look at the others. They wore expressions in varying degrees of uncomfortable and sympathetic, and Regina was the one to break the silence. "Well. You heard what he said. The only way to bring him back would be to send another willing soul to take his place, and I doubt anyone's going to be rushing to offer their life for the blackguard scoundrel Captain Hook. I'm sorry, Miss Swan, but – "

"There has to be someone," Henry persisted. "One of his crew – anyone – "

"They're pirates! Not altruists! Their interest is in survival, not in taking the fall for – "

"I'll do it," Will Scarlet said.

For a moment, Emma almost didn't think she'd heard properly. Then it crashed over her, equal parts alluring and horrifying, and she whirled on him. "Will – _what?"_

"I said," the young thief repeated. "I'll do it."

"What?" Emma couldn't believe she was trying to convince the one volunteer otherwise, but she still recoiled from the idea of this. Yet if it was the only way – the only one – "Will, what about everything you'd. . . what about Elsa. . . "

Will smiled, lopsided and painful. "Not like that can go anywhere, eh? She's a bloody queen, I'm still London street rubbish. And it's why I agreed to take on the poison for her, die once already. I know what it's like, see? I'm not. . . I'm not afraid of it. And I already told you I wasn't lettin' you do this alone. That I'd take the shots. Choose how I went." He shrugged. "And maybe this is it. I came back once before. Maybe I'd find a way again. Take a bit longer, sure. Be a bit more complicated. But still. Worth a shot."

Emma could not form her tongue around words sufficiently to respond. Was terrified to hope, and even more terrified to face the implications. "Will. . . I just. . . _why?"_

He glanced away. He seemed to be struggling with something he very dearly did not want to say, but which had to be come to at last, and which, in the end, was the only truth of the matter. "Because you're not the only one who loves him. That's all."

Emma should have had something to answer to that, but she didn't. She opened and shut her mouth for what felt like at least the third time that night, and finally looked at Regina instead. "So if it is a soul exchange," she said evenly, "I assume you know how to do that too?"

"Yes, but – " Regina snuffed the white end of the candle, rose to her feet, and emptied the cups of potion back into the cauldron, making a quick gesture to vanish it away. "As the pirate said, it's incredibly dangerous. I've never heard of anyone who did the spell any more than a few days on either side of All Hallows Eve, the night the worlds of the living and the dead are closest together. Trying it now could cause an astral rip, or worse. Throw the entire balance out of alignment, and then we might _all_ die. And time's your enemy when you're attempting magic like this. If we waited until next Halloween, it's not likely he'd remember his living self anymore."

"What? A _year?"_ The possibility was unthinkable. "And if he'd forget himself by then – no, we have to do it now. I don't care about the danger."

Regina regarded her with a sour smile. "So it's worth it to risk everyone's lives when you're the one doing it for your own reasons, but not for me and mine?"

"You cursed everyone for your revenge on my mother. This isn't the same thing." Emma stood up, their gazes meeting and crackling. "And if you don't help us do it, I'll do it myself. We could use your expertise, your experience, as I have no doubt you're very, very talented with black magic. As I said to you back in Norway, try doing something good with it for once."

Regina's eyes narrowed dangerously. "I don't care for your tone, Miss Swan."

"You don't have to care for anything about me. You just have to help with this." Emma remained unflinching. "Henry?"

After a glance between both of his mothers, the boy got to his feet, paused, then moved to stand beside her. "She's right," he said to Regina. "If you want to change, if you want to be different, then help us. Please."

Some of Regina's icy disdain melted as she looked at him, hurt and confused and tentative, until in that moment she was almost a child herself, an overgrown, abused, stunted girl fumbling along in a dark stew of rage and old grudges and her own broken heart, a girl who had desperately craved love her entire life but never known either how to give or receive it, who had thought she was the heroine but only became more and more the villain. "It's still not that easy," she said. "Even if we were to bring back his soul, without a body, there's no point in – "

"Oh," Emma said. "We have his body. I preserved it. It's waiting. So are they all."

Regina gaped at her. "What? Where?"

Emma smiled mirthlessly. "Applewood Hall," she said. "Looks like it's time for you to face the music."

* * *

Of course, it was not quite so simple. In lieu of All Hallows, Regina said they should do the spell on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year when the darkness was strongest, and that was still a week and a half from now. Emma was not about to go back to Yorkshire by herself and risk things going pear-shaped in London, and Regina refused to leave the Night Market until she had to. While she was also not the most popular of sights within its premises, and hence spent most of her time hidden in Robin's tent, it was clear that she felt safer here than she did confronting the people who had been asleep for almost three decades in her vault. The delay rasped on Emma's nerves, even though she knew it was to give the entire precarious enterprise the highest chance of success, and she found herself with too much time on her hands and not enough to occupy it, a dangerous combination. She wanted to talk to Will, but the fact remained that if she wanted Killian back, she had to agree to let him die for them. She was terrified that he wouldn't change his mind, even more terrified that he would, and the emotional whiplash rocked her back and forth until the only thing she could do was run. Entrusting Henry to the protection of Robin and Regina – he was taking to the underworld like a duck to water, would probably be running bounty hunting missions before the fortnight was out – she left the Night Market and returned to her old haunts across London, the Black Swan in one last swan song. Everything felt like a painful, surreal dream from which she could not quite wake.

Emma did her best to tie up loose ends, to close open doors. She launched an investigation to find out what _had_ happened to Archie Hopper, and was told that he had been held in prison for the last few months before the father of one of his clients, a young woman named Alice, had intervened with Parliament to get him released. She thought about visiting him on Harley Street for old times' sake, but selfishly, she didn't want to actually see him, to talk to him, to have him try to help her, even as well-intentioned as it would be. He might try to talk her out of this, and fragile as she was, the thought was all she could cling to. Ten days and nights, and each one hurt like possibly literal hell. She slept little, and ate less. _I'm turning into a ghost myself._

At last the solstice arrived, grey and foggy and freezing. Emma returned to the Market, collected Robin, Regina, Will, and Henry, and swept them up in a magical rush of smoke, transporting them in the blink of an eye back to Yorkshire. She had sent word ahead to warn everyone what was happening, and as they tumbled out onto the lawn, she fully expected to see torches and pitchforks waiting to greet them. But the only ones present were her parents, looking nervous but resolute, holding hands. "Hello, Regina," Snow said coolly. "It's been a long time."

Spying her stepdaughter and son-in-law, Regina was briefly at a loss for words, and her eyes flicked nervously over their heads, at the dark bulk of Applewood Hall. At last, she nodded stiffly, and Snow and Charming nodded back, though with expressions (at least in Charming's case) that made it quite clear what they thought of her presence here. But before things could get any more awkward, Robin stepped up and said loudly, "So, the vault?"

"This way," Henry said, darting to the front of the group and leading them across the wet grass to the stone door that opened under the hill. Snow and Charming were clearly not enthusiastic to reenter the place of their captivity so soon, and the thought sent a cold chill down Emma's back as well; she wasn't ready for this, she knew she wasn't. But Regina raised a hand, the door grated open, and frigid blackness breathed up at them. With that, bearing regally cold and correct, she started to descend, a fireball in her hand to light the way.

The steps were slick and steep, roots and rocks and other strange twisted things growing out of the earthen walls, and Emma had to force herself to keep going. Robin and Charming had to duck as the ceiling sloped down, and at last they emerged in the dim mausoleum, the glass coffins empty now except for one. Her gorge rose in her throat and she couldn't look at it, as Henry held her worriedly by the elbow. "Mum? Are you all right?"

"Yes," Emma said weakly. "Just. . . give me a minute."

It still took her a few moments until the nausea passed, and she could see straight again. It was definitely him, and he still looked exactly as he had when he died, which meant her preservation spell had done its work. She stumbled to his side, looked down at him, saw and cared about nothing but him, until Regina cleared her throat, and everyone jumped. Snow, the last one in, pulled the vault door closed with an ominous boom, and there was no sound but far-off dripping and the mournful howl of the winter wind.

"So," Regina said. "I'm well aware that none of you trust me, but you're going to have to. This is old, dangerous, dark magic, and I'm not even sure if it'll work, or if we'll rip a hole into hell and let all the demons escape. In which case, this wasn't my – "

"We're here to help Emma," Charming said. "All of us. Just tell us what to do."

Regina looked leery, but turned around, cleared the coffins away with a flick of a finger to leave her some space to work, and with a muttered word, blasted two pentacles into the floor – drawing them out laboriously by hand, as Emma had, was clearly for amateurs. Then she lit four tall white candles, and had Snow and Henry take two of them and stand at west and east. Under her direction, Robin and Charming opened the glass coffin, lifted Killian's body out, and carried him to the right-hand pentacle, where they laid him down. Then Will stepped into the left-hand pentacle, face grim and set. He had shaved, bathed, and otherwise made a general effort to clean himself up; he was wearing a brushed jacket and fresh cravat, clearly determined to make a good show of the end. Emma's throat closed at the sight, thousands of useless words running through her head. She wanted to thank him, to say anything, but everything felt small and insufficient.

Having finished with Killian, Charming and Robin took the final two white candles, moving so that the former stood at north, the latter at south, closing the four directions of the compass. Then Regina beckoned brusquely to Emma. "Miss Swan. You're going to need to help me."

Emma stepped through and stood beside Regina, her family and friends holding candles in a ring around her, Will to her left, Killian lying to her right. This seemed ever more impossible and bizarre and insane, but she didn't care. "I'm ready."

"Very well." Regina glanced around. "I don't know what's going to happen," she said. "Whatever does, don't move from your places, no matter what. If you break the circle, we lose any protection we have. Miss Swan, as before, you're going to have to call him. But whenever you open a door between life and death, all kinds of things will try to get through it – and not just the soul you want. If anything else, anything else at all, tries to follow him, you have to use lethal force. Shoot to kill." She smiled humorlessly. "I hope you can handle that."

"I can handle that," Emma replied, just as coolly. "Let's go."

Regina paused, then nodded. She raised both hands, and Emma followed suit. She concentrated for a long, nerve-wracking moment, then began to speak in an unfamiliar language, one that fell discordantly and jarringly on the ear, summoned up images of creeping things, dark places, wetness and weirdness and passages that led Away, tunnels with strange lights at the end. The vault was trembling as if a train was passing overhead, and dust sifted from the ceiling, the roots groaning and twisting. Emma was conscious of an almighty pressure, something shoving at her as she shoved back, grappling and manipulating a power greater and more terrible than anything she had touched before, which sought just as eagerly to overcome her and consume her, consume them all. The small, flickering flames of the candles seemed utterly insignificant against the ravening dark. The cessation of all things. The End.

Regina spoke a command in a loud voice, and there was a loud rushing noise, a bang, and then a screaming wind that scoured the skin off their faces, as everyone struggled to remain in place and not take a step. Emma's eyes were watering, but she could see the shape of a door starting to form, that same kind of blackness she had seen when they summoned Killian's spirit in the Night Market, of something well beyond life or living or any mortal ken. She could feel it pushing back against them, resisting the idea of giving way, and she and Regina fought against it with the combined strength of their magic, Emma's blazing white and Regina's a darker, bloody red, until at once, with a sound like an explosion, it yawned open.

"Call him!" Regina bellowed. "Now!"

"Killian Jones!" Emma's own voice was a scream, over the howling storm of the otherwhere. _"Killian Jones! KILLIAN JONES!"_

For a mad, terrible moment, nothing moved in the darkness. No hint of an answer, no trace of a soul. Then there was a spark, and a flash, and a flame, burning black. It licked in eager trails up the silhouette of something, some _one,_ and in a moment more, in a realization that stopped her heart, she recognized him, striding toward her with that same easy, confident grace as always, leather jacket swirling and flapping in his dark shadow. He grew closer and closer, about to cross the threshold, to step back into the world of the living, and her fingers itched to reach out to him, to bring him home. A moment now, only a moment, and then –

" _Emma!"_ The voice was faint, nearly ripped away in the chaos, but it snapped her spine straight like a whip. _"Emma, no, it's a trap, it's a trap!"_

She jerked out of her trance, ripped her hand back from where it had almost reached into the doorway to death, and stared in confusion, swiftly ripening to panic, as a _second_ small figure appeared. _"Love, no, that's the darkness! It's not me, it's the bloody darkness! Don't let it through!"_

The first Killian, the one waiting at the door just inches away from the world of the living, looked over his shoulder, beheld his doppelganger sprinting toward them, and blanched. "Bloody hell!" he shouted. "Don't listen to that, it's the fake! Emma, it's me! You know it's me!"

Horrified, Emma stared between the two Killians, identical down to the last detail, as the second one kept running toward her. _The darkness._ It had died in Killian's body, after all – no wonder that was the form it found the most convenient to inveigle her to let it back into the world again. But if she chose the wrong one – if she brought the ultimate demon back to life, and left Killian himself trapped forever – if that evil force re-entered Killian's body and utterly undid everything they had fought and suffered for, became unstoppable, terrible, devouring –

And with that, in a moment of freezing, crystal clarity, she knew exactly what she had to do.

Ignoring the shouts of her family, screaming at her to get back, Emma stepped forward, one foot and then the other. Walked the path directly into the mouth of hell, feeling it pummeling and scouring her. She knew that if she went too deep, it would take a second life to buy her back, and she shrank at the thought of sacrificing any of those in the vault – even Regina. But she couldn't stop. _Everything or nothing._

The power of the doorway ripped and sucked and chewed at her, gulping up her living warmth and light and magic, the unseen and the monstrous straining to get at her from every side. One Killian was reaching out toward her. "Emma! Emma, love. Take my hand. Take my hand!"

The other Killian was staring at her, horror-struck. "No!" he screamed. "No! Get out of here! Bloody hell! Emma, no! Run. _Run!"_

Something exploded behind her. The way back was growing thinner every moment, twisted and choked and closing, as Regina struggled in vain to hold back the thundering tide that she and Emma had fought together. Demons were skittering and crawling and flittering, converging eagerly on their chance to burst through into existence again, and Emma had no time, nothing but the maddest of wagers. She put on one final, impossible burst of speed, and threw herself toward the second Killian, the one who had yelled at her to run.

He saw her coming, and a look of horror crossed his face. But then he was launching himself back at her, as the winds of hell buffeted them crosswise, as his fingertips batted at hers, as she seized – couldn't grab him, not quite – even as the first Killian was screaming at her to get away from him, that he was the fraud, the imposter, the trick, that she was about to make a terrible mistake that could not be undone. Yet with an effort beyond all knowledge or ability or anything but the uttermost end, she reached out, grasped hold, and pulled.

They went tumbling head over heels, head over heels over head over heels, falling, falling, _falling_ back toward the doorway, even as it shrank and shivered out of existence. There was only a window now – only a keyhole – they weren't going to make it back in time – they were going to be trapped here forever, neither living nor dead, neither together nor apart, in the worst purgatory for eternity –

And then, Emma saw something – someone – running. Saw them hit the opening at full speed, breaking it just wide enough, just long enough, for her and Killian to hit it and crash through onto the stone of the vault. The doorway exploded out of existence, collapsing inwards in a maw of darkness that consumed itself like an ouroboros, the snake eating its tail, and everything went quiet. Utterly, stonily, terribly silent. She was not entirely sure if she was alive, or if her spirit had been ripped out of her body in that otherworldly tempest and she hadn't noticed. She didn't know if Killian was – was anything, really. Didn't know who had jumped. Couldn't move. Could only stare up at nothing, as sparks and flashing lights wheeled nonsensically by.

Yet in a few moments more, sense began to return. She was alive. She was breathing, even if in short, wheezing gasps that couldn't get enough air into her bruised lungs. Then she rolled over onto her scraped and bloodied hands and knees, and crawled desperately toward the right-hand pentacle. Lifted Killian into her arms, looking frantically for any sign of life, and saw nothing. His eyes were still closed, sunken and blue in the hollow orbits of his skull. His chest wasn't moving. Perhaps his spirit had crashed into its body, but found nothing to anchor it there, couldn't fire itself back to functionality after almost a month dead, couldn't. . .

"Killian." She cradled his face, holding it against her chest. "Killian, no. Killian, don't do this to me. Where are you? Where are you! Killian. _Killian!"_

Still nothing. Had she chosen wrongly after all, taken the darkness back instead of him, left his real soul trapped there, all for naught? She thought her parents, and possibly Regina, were saying something, but it clanged uselessly off her ears. Her world had shrunk to herself, and him, and the only desire that she had space for, inside her. She shook him. _"Killian!"_

He wasn't waking up.

He wasn't waking up.

Emma couldn't focus, couldn't function, couldn't exist, felt as if she was flying apart at the seams, into the stuff of stars and comets and the darkness of something beyond space or matter itself. She was making a sound she didn't even recognize as hers, a terrible thin whimper, as she lifted his head against hers, nuzzled his cold, still face, and tried to breathe into him, to make him stay, to make him stay. She would have given anything, would have cut out her own heart raw and bloody and pressed it into his chest, would have traded her own soul back in an instant. But she couldn't, and he didn't, and she was screaming, she was screaming without stopping, but she wasn't making a sound. Shaking from head to toe, sobbing in terrible, back-breaking spasms, she leaned down and kissed him for the last time. Kissed him, she knew beyond all doubt, goodbye.

Something happened, then. Something shook the vault to its foundations, an explosion of iridescent white magic that burst out like a fountain, brighter and then brighter, crashing against the walls and rebounding, as Snow and Charming clutched each other, Regina clutched Henry, and Robin held up both hands in shock. Emma could barely take in the fact that Will was gone, that he must have been the one to leap as he had promised, to sacrifice himself for them at the end of all things, didn't know what was happening, what had –

And then, in her arms, she felt Killian shudder from head to toe. Stared down at him in teary, panicked confusion – as his chest heaved, as he sucked in a laborious breath and then another, and his eyes flickered open, showing a slit of blue. His head rolled back in the crook of her elbow, he frowned at her in bemusement, and then smiled sleepily. "Hey, love," he whispered. "You look beautiful. But what. . . in the blazes. . . just happened?"

Emma stared at him a moment longer, then went completely and beyond all measure to pieces. Pulled him against her shoulder and wept in screaming, gasping sobs, the kind that rocked her from head to toe, as Snow and Charming rushed to hold her from either side, as Henry knelt down beside her, as even Regina and Robin clustered around, until she could finally breathe again, until the storm had passed, and she thought she could see the sun coming up. That tomorrow the days would grow longer again, and the light would return, and the future was once more possible, and bright, and new. "Killian," she murmured back, and felt a smile stretching her lips, wider and wider until she couldn't bear it, until there was no way to control or contain the feeling that expanded in her chest, until she started to laugh through her tears, cupping his face, as he reached up to comb his ringed fingers through her hair. She bent down to press their foreheads together, to feel his breath on her cheek, to kiss him again, to never stop, as they remained there, rocking, and all she could say over and over was, "It's you. It's you. It's you."


	35. Epilogue

Emma woke beneath the sharp-slanted eaves of the majestic, sprawling attic bedchamber, the rich red curtains lashed to the posts and weak sunlight laying tracks across the magnificent Persian carpet. The logs in the hearth were still burning low, then and odd flaring an ember; they had not gotten to sleep until very late, nearly dawn, due to the racket of fireworks set off to herald the turn of the century, Anno Domini 1900. Emma remembered reaching it once before, in another reality. One where the curtains were black, the floor was bare, where she slept alone and had for decades, where she was Jafar's remorseless assassin and Henry and Killian were nothing more than long-dead ghosts. She had wondered what would happen as this real moment approached. Almost dreaded that this had just been another dream the entire time, another false reality that Jafar had crafted and sprung on her, and that now it would have to end. It had on this same day before, after all. But when she had voiced her fear last night, feeling faintly ridiculous for doing so, Killian had pulled her into his side and nuzzled her hair. "It's no dream, love," he said. "This is our life. It's real."

Emma had smiled, kissed him on the cheek, and told him that in which case, they could merely consider the fireworks a special anniversary celebration. As of today, they had been wed for forty-eight years; they were married on New Year's 1852, twelve days after she had saved him, in a small and private ceremony at Applewood Hall. Forty-eight eventful, exciting, not always easy, but on the whole deeply wonderful years, helping to rebuild the Night Market, continuing to resist the Royal Society, slowly repairing relations with her family, and starting their own. Their five children were in London for the holidays: Henry, their sons Charles and William, and their daughters Eva and Elizabeth. Each of the Swan-Jones offspring had pursued an adventurous career, some on righter sides of the law than others (then again, Killian had remarked, it would be a shame if at least one son of his didn't end up a pirate). In this ambition Charles had deeply gratified him, while to the communal befuddlement William became an investment banker, a choice which would have been deplored by one of his namesakes, a young thief, but much approved by the other, a Royal Navy captain. Eva had decided to travel the world in her own airship and had flown in from Zanzibar or some other far-off place, while Elizabeth had moved to America and joined the suffragettes. As for Henry, he and his wife Violet lived in Applewood Hall, where he wrote books of fairytales.

Emma smiled at the thought of the children and grandchildren arriving later today for tea, doubtless full of stories of all the excitement in the streets, everything there was to be seen, everything that seemed so hopeful in a shining new twentieth century. She hoped, however, that her grandsons would get far away from Europe, and soon. She knew there was a great war coming in fourteen years, what would happen to all the young men then, and sometimes despaired of how on earth humanity could make it through to the future that she and Killian had visited, the modern mechanical one. Sometimes she hoped that it could still be changed, that it might not come to pass entirely as it was. That there would be, even then, a drop of magic yet remaining in the world.

She rolled over to look at her husband. Forty-eight years of waking up together in the morning, for they had rarely spent a night apart since their marriage, and she did not take it for granted. He would turn eighty-one this August, but he was still the handsomest man she had ever seen, hair a rich silver and blue eyes well creased in laugh lines, the grey beard becoming him just as well as had the dark one. He remained fairly spry considering his age, but after two bad falls he couldn't get around very well without his rolling chair, which he loved to give the grandchildren rides on at speeds which uniformly horrified their mothers. And while Killian Jones as a young man had flown across the globe, fought and swashbuckled and swaggered in a dark and dashing drama, Killian Jones as an old one most often preferred to sit out in the garden with his wife and drink rum, the one part of his pirate life he saw no need to give up. He had lived his time, done his deeds, and could rest secure in the knowledge that Charles was vigorously keeping up his father's generally antagonistic relationship with political authority.

Emma smiled at him, peacefully asleep in their great bed, and stroked a lock of hair out of his face. At nearly seventy-seven she was hardly a spring chicken herself, and the holiday and their summer visit to Norway had been exhausting for her. But they still went every year. Elsa had died in 1881 at the age of only fifty-seven, unmarried and childless, and Princess Anna had become queen, a role which she had conscientiously embodied for the past two decades; the _Kongeriger_ loved its stout, motherly monarch and even its reindeer-smelling prince consort, as well as their large family (which was rumored to contain a troll or two). Emma thought that Elsa had not been able to bring herself to marry any of the eminently suitable European princes paraded in front of her, to content herself with a union of convenience when even briefly, something else was possible, and she had to fight the guilt, the pain that dimmed and could be forgotten for even years at a time, but never went away entirely. Yet Elsa had never once said a cruel word of it to her. _She and Will gave up their happy ending for mine._

Knowing that, Emma had done her utmost to respect the time she had been given. After many fits and starts and backslides, she and Regina had built a cordial coexistence for Henry's sake, one that eventually deepened into familiarity and genuine friendship, helped along by their work in the Night Market together. Once she joined it, Regina had never really left, and of course, she would never be far from Robin. The two of them had soon married as well, but since Robin had died a few years ago, Emma had seen to it that the widowed Regina was included in the family Christmas celebrations. _We are old, all of us._ It was still an odd thought to wrap her head around, that she should be living out her days in happiness with her extended and eccentric family, but was reaching now the twilight of those years, that more had gone by for them than remained. After all the strange things she had seen with time, all the mysteries and implausibilities she had experienced, all the journeys and twists and turns to both past and future, this simple, inescapable one remained the strangest.

But she could have chosen differently. She could have chosen to return to Misthaven with her parents, become a crown princess and then a queen, live her life in ease and comfort with every whim catered for and no more need to struggle – and a life that, thanks to the faerie magic that sustained it, was liable to go on for hundreds or even several hundreds of years. The prospect was, of course, deeply tempting. But after everything, after all the choices she had made, after what she had learned about who Emma Swan truly was, she couldn't see herself in that life. She did not want the static, the removed, the immutable, ineffable, perfect, the realm that existed as a legend, insulated from the turbulent currents of a flawed human world, that place that was so unearthly beautiful but like a dream you could not wake from. She needed Earth and its filth and chaos and _reality,_ its uncertainty and adventure and excitement. As ever, Killian had told her that the decision was hers to make, that he would live as a prince consort in Misthaven or as an occasionally former pirate in London, whichever would make her happiest. And when it came down to it, there was ultimately almost no question at all.

Emma still saw her parents, and visited through the Night Market, but not as much as she used to. They had rebuilt their devastated realm, had another child, her brother James, and would certainly go down in the annals of the fae as two of their greatest rulers. Yet as she grew older, became a mother and a grandmother and a well-respected figure in magical and mundane society alike, a patroness of homes for orphans and broken women and other causes dear to her heart, as her life moved on, Emma felt less and less comfortable there, this world of the immortal and perfect and young. The fae folk did die, but as noted, not for a long time, and she had considered the prospect that her parents might very well be the ones to bury her, as they looked younger than she did. Sometimes she still wished more than anything that they had been the ones to raise her, that they had been as close as they were always supposed to be, that she knew how to let them in once and for all. But that future was gone, and she herself had made the choice not to change things, when they had the opportunity of stopping the Dark Curse before it was ever cast. When she herself had decided to be who she was. James was that child now, that boy who would rule Misthaven in his turn. That child Snow and Charming had never lost. At least one of them would get to have it, what might have been. And for that, and for what she had, the mortal life she had chosen, Emma could not regret a thing.

She was still lying there, looking fondly at the sleeping Killian, when to her surprise, she heard a firm knock on the front door, echoing up through the house. It was too early for any of the family to be arriving, and she didn't suppose the milk or the paper was being delivered today. She thought one of the staff would get it; she and Killian were uncomfortable having any servants at all, but as they got older, some help about the household had become a necessity. Then she remembered that she'd given them the holidays off, and with that, there seemed no other option but to answer this disreputably early caller herself.

Emma crawled out of bed, draped her shawl around her shoulders, and took hold of her cane; she too was not as steady on her feet as she used to be. Muttering imprecations quite unsuited for a wealthy grandmother and society matron, she crossed the room, opened the door, and descended the stairs. It was three flights down from their bedroom, and given Killian's wheeling chair and her cane, it might be more convenient to move to a lower floor, but both of them were too attached to their eagle's eyrie and refused with combined stubbornness to be parted from it just yet. The house was still and grand and quiet. Picturesque, the decorated tree in the parlor as now was firmly the fashion, the supper in the icebox waiting to be cooked in the new gas stove, the white cloth spread on the dining room table. Everything ready.

The knock came again.

Emma reached the bottom of the steps and hobbled across the splendid foyer carpet to the door, undoing the bolt-chain and twisting the great brass key. She pulled it open just a crack; the weather had been ghastly cold recently, winds blowing down from snowbound Scotland, and even through the small opening, she could feel the chill. "Good morning, yes, I'm quite sure we're not interested in whatever rubbish you're peddling, so be off with – "

"Good morning, ma'am." The young man on the doorstep doffed his knitted cap and smiled crookedly at her. "And happy holidays to you too."

For an endless moment, Emma felt as if all the breath and blood had been drained from her, as if she had been rendered an ice statue herself on the instant, with no room for anything but something equal parts shock, disbelief, joy, and apprehension. _"You?"_

"Aye." Will Scarlet smiled again, faintly sad. He looked not a day older than when he had sacrificed himself almost fifty years ago, jumped down the doorway into death and vanished into nothing, and as he looked her over from head to toe, Emma could see him taking in just how long it had been, how much had changed. "Thought this was the right address, anyway. Didn't want to go round bangin' on doors on New Year's, they'd likely chuck things at me or light my arse on fire to see if I'd pop off and sparkle. Anyway, so, this _was_ the right one, so – "

"What are you doing here?" Emma interrupted. "Are you – you worked it out? How to. . . to make it back?"

"Well, see." Will's big brown eyes flickered to hers. "Turns out, gettin' back wasn't the hard part. Since I went for someone else, I could leave whenever I wanted. Coulda strolled out the next day if I took a mind to it. But I. . . well, if I left, Killian woulda had to come back, and I wasn't going to do that. Make it all a bit pointless, really. How long has it been?"

"Forty-eight years," Emma said, throat suddenly dry. "It's New Year's Day. 1900."

"Ah." Will paused. "I would have stayed longer," he said softly. "I'd have given you those full fifty years, if I could. Sixty, even. But they – well, he, I may have spent most of these past five decades annoyin' the fellow who runs the dead people world, entirely through no fault of me own – made me go. Said it was time. Said it was enough."

"Will. . ." Emma's throat had closed. She didn't know what to say, how to take in the revelation that he had stayed of his own volition to be sure that she and Killian had their lives together, or how to face the fact that now that he had returned, it must be almost time for Killian to go again, at last and for good. She wasn't ready for that, couldn't stand it any more than she had the first time, and he reached out concernedly, but she flinched back. "Do you know. . ." She struggled to get her tongue around the word, hot and heavy as an anvil. "When?"

"No bloody clue," Will said frankly. "Could be hours. Could be days. Could be another few months – bloody hell, even a year, or more. Nobody's stayed that long of their own choice before, on behalf of someone else, so that makes the timing wonky. Not so simple as me reappearin' and Killian leavin'. I've stretched things out, twisted 'em around, made a right mess." He grinned. "And now, well. . . now I'm back here. With a new century before me, and the world changed, and time to learn how to live again. Could be worse. Could be."

Emma nodded wordlessly. She felt suddenly very old indeed, leaning on her cane, in front of his preternatural youth, his return from the grave. She didn't think she could stand it if he asked about Elsa, and then considered that he might well already know. Might have been waiting for Elsa when she came down there nineteen years ago. Perhaps in some way, they _had_ had time together, a reunion, a – no, it could not be called a life, seeing as it had perforce happened in death, but that they had not been apart forever after all.

"So," Will said, after a moment. "I just. . . I thought you had a right to know. You don't have to see me again, if you don't want. Can't imagine it's very comfortable. But so there. It's done. It's come full circle." He paused. "Killian, he's. . . he's been happy? This time? With you?"

Emma nodded again, then made herself speak. "More than anything."

A shy, sweet grin flitted across Will's face, almost ashamed of itself. He nodded firmly. "That's good," he said, and crammed his hat back onto his head, prominent ears bright pink with the cold. "That's good, ma'am. Happy New Year."

With that, he jumped off the stoop, landing with a crunch in the fresh-fallen snow, and strode off. Emma watched him to the end of the block, half-expecting that he would disappear like an itinerant spirit, but he left footsteps the entire way, real and present, _there._ Her breath steamed silver, the wind tugged at her shawl. At last she came to herself, stepped back inside, shut the door, worked the locks, and then a small spell, glowing gold. Turned, and started the slow ascent back up the stairs to the bedroom.

Killian was awake when she opened the door, and grinned drowsily at her. "There you are, love. What were you doing? Who the bloody hell was that?"

Emma hesitated, then shucked the shawl, put down the cane, and got back into bed, pulling up the heavy quilts and rolling into Killian's warmth, even as he uttered a small sound of protest at the touch of her freezing extremities. "Nobody," she said. "Hold me."

As always, he did, putting his arms around her and snuggling her close, as she nestled her head onto his chest to listen to the reassuring deep, solid thump of his heart. She closed her eyes tightly, losing herself in him, in his presence, in his life. Not yet. It would not be just yet. Eventually, of course, he would have to go. _All men must die._ But it would not be today, it would not be now. She still had him for a little while, and would treasure every instant of it more than ever. For their future was still to come, and now, as the sun came up full, as it spilled onto their bed in golden glow, as it burned richer than any aether and the new century began, as the world spun on – here in each other's arms, in this sanctuary, it would be forever.

**The End.**


End file.
